Web design has become an aspect of business that has become more relevant in today’s marketplace to succeed due to the increase in internet usage to connect with consumers and businesses. Like many other aspects of business, web design has its mistakes business owners are continuously making every day. These mistakes can be detrimental in the success to your business in the online environment and we want to help steer you clear from making them.

We’ve listed here the 4 common mistakes business owners have been making and why it’s important for you to avoid making them. If you can avoid making these mistakes in your web design you can put your business in the right place to drive in the traffic your website needs for your business to succeed.

1) Using Web Design Templates

All over the internet one can find sites that offer free web site builder templates for designing web pages. While these templates do offer non-professional web designers an easy and inexpensive option for building a website, they tend to create more havoc than good for users in the long run. First, they are usually very limited in what they offer in terms of design options and customization capabilities. This then leads into disadvantages such as the inability to match your offerings, landing pages and content with your site. These then lead to problems with optimization due to the importance each of these factors plays in how a search engine ranks websites.

2) Not Optimizing Your Site

People often design a website, generate the relevant content, and leave it at that. There is a lot of competition over the Internet and such a website will not deliver you the desired results you seek. After you design your site and add your company’s content, it’s important for you to optimize your site for search engines with meta data such as keywords, page titles and descriptions. By including these aspects into your site, it allows for search engines to properly index your website, and allows users to easily find you when searching something relevant to your website. Proper optimization of your website will increase your search engine rankings. Having a high ranking website within the search engines is highly desired due to the fact that internet users usually only click on the links on the first few pages of search engine results, with the majority (60%) being the top three organic search results. This makes optimizing your web site very important, and should be included in your web design process. It doesn’t matter if you have a great looking site, with engaging information, if no one can find you!

3) Poorly Done Site Navigation

During your web design process, ensuring your site’s navigation is done appropriately is extremely important in term of keeping visitors on your site. If visitors find your site hard to navigate through they will just move onto another site, maybe even your competitors. You want your site to have an easy flow from page to page so visitors can quickly find useful information. By setting up user friendly navigation, you can decrease your bounce rate and increase your unique visitor and new visitor ratings.

4) Poor Content Creation

The most important aspect to driving in traffic and keeping your website ranked high in the search engines is keeping your site up to date with fresh content. Search engines love websites that are continuously updating their site with fresh and relevant content. By neglecting updates to your site, search engines will surely begin to decrease your rankings within them. Another reason for updating your content is that customers want to see that you are busy and keeping involved with the online environment. Giving them reason to visit your site each day will help maintain a continuous flow of traffic and an increase of new traffic to your site.

Blue Atlas Marketing is a professional web marketing firm that specializes in website development. To avoid making these mistakes and getting the most out of your web design investment contact us and let us build the website you need to build your business.