When you’re a business owner, having a website is beneficial. It allows you to be connected to a broader and bigger audience of potential customers. A website lets you introduce your business, who the owner is, and what are the products and services you render.
Designing your website for your customization is essential. Your website must reflect your business’ branding so loyal customers can easily identify it and attract new ones. A lot of things need to be considered in the customization process. Here’s a list of the five things you should not do when customizing your website.
Using Complex Layout
Choosing the right layout is crucial if you want your business website to thrive. The website’s layouts are the patterns, styles, and arrangements of everything on it. Having complex layouts for your website might look good, but it won’t benefit your business.
Remember, first impressions matter, and it’s through your layout that your visitors feel, see, and navigate throughout your website. Putting in a lot of clutter, too many designs, intricate animations, and so much more can become an eyesore instead of an attraction for your visitors.
With that said, you’re losing out on potential and loyal customers each day if you won’t mind how your website looks. Choosing the website layout is the most important thing to consider before getting a custom built site.
Among the things that you should instead focus on in your website layout are:
- Familiarity – All the visuals on your website, from the photos to the headers to the logos, must meet the customer’s expectations. It should provide visual cues on the services and products you offer.
- Accuracy – Populating your website with brand-accurate visual elements is website design 101. The features to be placed needs to be consistent to reflect your business brand throughout your website.
- Simplicity – Customers prefer a simple, straightforward website layout. It helps them to quickly absorb the information on the website and easily engage the website interfaces.
Putting Too Much Text
Aside from the complex layout, another prevalent mistake you should avoid when creating your customized website is putting too much text in it. You’ll want to provide as much information to your website visitors as possible. Unfortunately, putting too many texts on the website causes boredom and disengagement.
Most people are visual beings. They would want to see more photos or illustrations and as little text as possible. It’s not appealing to website visitors to see long paragraphs about your services and products.
Moreover, the font you use in the text you place on the website is important. They have a real effect on the website experience and engagement. That is why you should never use more than three typefaces as well as those unattractive ones, as this would make the website messy.
On the one hand, you’ll have a high website bounce rate when you have unclear and glitchy navigation. Having a high bounce rate means that many visitors to your website leave immediately after viewing the website’s first page. If they leave immediately, they’re not converted into customers, and you won’t be making any sales on them.
On the other hand, when your website is easy to navigate, visitors’ experience improves. Customers who are satisfied with your service/products will gladly return to your website should they need something more from you. With ease of navigation, you’re greatly improving user experience, contributing to your customer’s overall satisfaction when they’re on your website.
Using Features That Don’t Convert
Using inefficient features in your website is among the common errors business owners make during customization. No matter how visually appealing an element in your website is, it’s not helpful if it doesn’t contribute to converting visitors to customers. You place an element in your website to help gather and attract customers, not just for mere visualization.
For example, when you want to include a carousel feature in your website, make sure that it has visible controls, limited slides, and placing the most important information you want to relay to the visitors first. Ensure that each slide contains information about your products or services that customers can get. This helps in converting mere visitors into newly minted customers.
Overlooking Mobile-Friendliness
When customizing your website, ensure that you employ a responsive design for mobile phones. 58% of the global website traffic is from mobile devices. In fact, nearly 80% of people indicated that they would likely return to a website and share it with others if it’s mobile-friendly. It means that if your website is difficult to navigate using a mobile phone, it can lead to user frustration and an increased bounce rate.
Your website needs to be responsive to what devices potential and loyal customers have. They now use multiple devices like phones, laptops, tablets, and TVs to access websites. The website needs to be versatile no matter what device a customer uses. It should always be appealing and interactive so that they would enjoy traversing it.
Final Thought
By avoiding the five most common mistakes business owners make when customizing their websites, you’re boosting the website’s credibility and offering an experience that would make them continuously return. The website is now connected to your business brand. It reflects not only your business but also you as the business owner. You must always ensure that your website is heading towards converting more visitors to customers.
