Business Website Design Mistakes to Avoid

Like us, you’ve probably seen hundreds of design mistakes on business websites. Some entrepreneurs think they can take their personal site and twist it around to form their business site template. Business websites have come a long way since 1998. Are you living a decade in the past? Time to get up to speed. Take care of these business site design mistakes and get ready for 2010.

1. Not Planning – most of us – including us the first time, didn’t sit down and design every page of our business site. Now you must. The competition has set the bar much higher than it used to be. Before you even begin the coding you’ll need to draw out every page. Where will you have the links? What will be in the header? Everything needs to be analyzed, voted on by your group. Your ideas might NOT be the best – open it up to others you trust for a vote. Remember your site can have at most 3 goals – and must have at least 1. Your business site could 1.) Give info. 2.) Sell something. or, 3.) Collect leads.

Stick to whichever goals you choose for the site and make them the focus of the entire site. Everything should be built around those goals.

2. Not Listing Contact Information on Every Page – online surfers are fickle and will click off a site in a heartbeat if they can’t find what they need. Provide contact info, links to disclaimer, privacy statement, shipping info, testimonials, and “about” on every page to make it ultra-simple to find everything they need.

3. Broken links – dead links (hyperlinks) that go to error pages are a sure sign that the site is not well maintained. If the business site isn’t well-maintained and can’t take care of itself – can they take care of you? There’s doubt at this point – don’t put doubt in your future customer’s heads. Fix all dead links to pages, images, videos, everything.

4. Old Info – There’s nothing worse that a customer getting excited about something, and taking the next step like writing you, calling, or ordering what they see on the site – and then being told it doesn’t exist. You just lied to your customer. You must keep your business information up to date and valid. Errors are the equivalent of lies. Don’t lie to your business customers.

5. Style Nightmare – use at the most – two different fonts on your business website. For quotes and other special text areas you could add another – like Courier New without it being too distracting. Use colors that blend together well. Use lots of white space. Use a plain background for your page – usually anything but is too distracting.

6. Orphaned Pages – every page on your business site needs a link back to the home page. There should be links to all your top information pages, and, if your contact information isn’t already on the page – links to that as well.

7. Disabling the Back Button – on occasion we still see it – webmasters breaking the back button. Don’t do it – ever! The back and forward buttons are basic to navigation – some still use them. Don’t mess with them.

8. Pop-Ups - in the past there was a time when every business site had pop-ups behind the window, in front of the window, on site exit – there were lots of them. Eventually it became so annoying that browsers started blocking them. There are some that STILL get through. Don’t add popups to your site. The only one that is acceptable is one you might see on this site- a special offer to grab an email subscription that will get you free and deeply discounted training courses. It pops slowly and fades over the page you’re on – gently – and, most users don’t find this that annoying. Most business sites are using this technology now (from Aweber.com).

9. Huge Index Pages – there are still a lot of surfers on connections slower than a T1. If your index page forces the load of a 1MB or larger FLASH or other media file before being able to see your site you’ll see a HUGE number of bounces from your home page. Keep your index page at 100KB or so, if you have large files – provide them as optional downloads on other pages deeper in the site – not as mandatory downloads on your index page.

10. Using Latest Technology – wait, let me explain. There are video codecs that few people have installed on their computers. It’s really annoying when I think I’m going to see a video and then I get the codec error message asking if I want to go look for it on the web. Heck no – I want to go to a different website that knows what they’re doing.

Your site must be recent, relevant, and yet not go overboard. If you think you’re cool because you use the latest technology – but only 2% of visitors to your site can use it too – you failed. Don’t force users to go download 3rd party software – most won’t.