5 Detrimental Web Design and Development Mistakes

web design and development

So you’ve decided it’s time to give your website a new lease on life. You spend time carefully planning the new look and feel of your design. After months of hard work, you decide it’s finally time to let the world see what you’ve been up to.

Yet, weeks after launching your new web design and development, you realize you still aren’t attracting your target audience.

Yes, this is frustrating. But don’t give up hope just yet. Your target audience is out there, ready to connect with you. However, there’s a good chance your new site design is actually the thing that’s getting in the way of you establishing that connection.

What mistakes could you be making with your site?

Keep reading to learn about the top 5 detrimental web design and development mistakes.

Mistake #1: No Plan

Not having a plan in place for your web design and development is the worst mistake you can make.

You should always have your target audience in mind with every decision you make. You need to think about what appeals to them visually, what type of social language and terms they use, what social media platforms they like best, and how often they communicate.

To get a better understanding of your target audience, do a search for your type of business. Check out the top 5 results to get an idea of what your audience is into.

Mistake #2: Pop-ups

Raise your hand if you enjoy browsing a site that has pop-up pages.

No one? Ok, that’s what we thought.

Well, guess what? Your audience hates pop-ups too.

Elaborate pop-ups prevent users from accessing your main content at an efficient speed. And if there’s one thing users love, it’s efficiency.

Google also loves user efficiency. And if there’s something that’s getting in the way of user efficiency- aka a pop-up blocking the main content of the site- Google won’t be afraid to penalize you. 

Therefore, annoying pop-up pages need to go.

Mistake #3: Your Images and Media Files are Too Big

Beautiful images help make your site look professional.

But you need to be careful about the size of your images and videos. If they are too large, they can negatively impact your site speed.

And a slow site could lower your ranking, as Google rewards sites with quick load times.

Mistake #4: Text in Images

You need to make sure you are including a text layer over an image, as opposed to just putting the text into an image.

If you put a text into an image, search engines won’t be able to see it. If your text contains targeted keywords, search engines won’t be able to pick them up, which basically makes them useless.

Make sure to use text layers so search engines don’t miss any of your keywords.

Mistake #5: Having One Page Listing Multiple Products/Services

Ideally, you want to aim for one service/keyword per page.

This makes it easy for search engines to tell what each page is about so they can rank it accordingly.

Multiple products or services on a page can be confusing to search engines and cause you to lose ranking.

Web Design and Development Mistakes: Wrap Up

Hopefully, fixing these design mistakes helps boost your site traffic.

Drop us a line if you have any questions. Also, be sure to check out our SEO resources page for more help on taking your website to the next level.