You have your business, you have your product, you even have your website, all there’s left to do is to get a web design that attracts and copy that converts. Whether you hire a freelancer, content writing agencies in India, or decided to do it yourself, it is better to first learn about the mistakes that are not to be made when it comes to website design and content.
Scroll down below for our comprehensive list of all things wrong with website design and content.
- Mismatched Typography: The essence of a good design is its typography. You can have the perfect mood board for your product but the glory of it all will mean nothing if you include in it fonts that don’t go together. Take the following picture for instance. The conservation of Montserrat goes perfectly with the playful visuals of its accompanying font. This is one example of how to make font combinations that go perfectly with your design.
- Spacing: The culprit of most designs gone wrong is irregular spacing. It’s too much when it should be less and too less when it should be more. Getting the spacing rights in different screen resolutions is the tricky part. You can adjust line spacing as per your laptop screen size but the minute you open the website on your phone, it gets distorted. One way to make sure your line spacing is modified enough to not have your eyes move too much is by placing the text in the middle. But then comes the letter spacing. Letter spacing has to be the trickiest of the two. It has to be just enough so you can read through the words but not so much that every letter becomes an individual word. Increasing line spacing should be in consideration of how the text will appear on the phone. Too much of it will make the words bleed into the edges of the screen, making it difficult for the eyes to read comfortably.
- Relevant Content: Let’s take a brand that you might want to follow for content strategy. Their website design has accurately placed CTAs, SEO-driven articles on the home page and backlinks spread throughout the site. You follow them. You follow their design to the extent that your website has a similar content approach. What do you do now? Sit back and let Google go gaga over your website SEO? But here’s where you’ve gone wrong, your content is not relevant either to your product or your audience. 55% of the audience says that the content they receive on a daily basis is not relevant to them. Having a content plan helps in this case. Start by researching your niche, what content is already available at the disposal of the audience and what’s missing. What’s missing is what you could work on.
- Complicated Site Maps: The importance of sitemaps ranges beyond the ease of navigation. Sitemaps are an important tool for your website SEO rankings, say SEO agencies in India. Sitemaps are basically the blueprint of your website. They guide the user through the pages on your website and provide aid in finding the content that they need. And since sitemaps contain information about every website page, this is what makes them so Google-friendly (note: Google ranks web pages and not websites)
- Too Much Content: How much is too much? The answer. However, is relative. What is enough for you may not be for someone else. Same goes for website content. If you are using someone else’s website for inspiration for your own, please note that the relevancy and the amount of content on that website may not be applicable to yours. This also goes by saying that too much content on your web pages can look cluttered and call for a bad UX. Too much content includes text, images and graphics. The home page is the most important page of your website. It is here where the visitors (potential clients) decide whether to continue scrolling through all your pages or go back to Google search results. Hence, an endless content-heavy home page is never a good idea.
- Missing H1 and H2 Headings: SEO services suggest that the importance of header tags goes beyond providing structure to the theme and content of the web page. Header tags are SEO friendly. The content under these tags is seen to be as more important by SEO than any other on the page, starting, of course, with H1, going down to H2 and so on. While the tags go all the way down to H4, H5, and H6, you should concentrate on the first three and include your main structural keywords to them.
- Webpage Load Time: With a nearly infinite number of websites at their disposal, visitors prefer not to suffer from slow-loading websites. A one-second delay in load time causes 11% fewer page views. And if a web page takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of visitors tend to abandon it. In other words, every second counts. Again, Google’s algorithms take page load time under consideration while ranking web pages for relevant search results. Hence, if you have a lengthier load time, Google will tend to push down your web page to later pages of search results.
- Keeping Content Updated: According to content writing services India, frequently updating website content not only keeps the visitors engaged with your page, you and your business but also search engines. The more you update with blogs, pictures, videos, etc, the more indexing will your website receive. Creepers tend to crawl through websites with frequent posts more than the ones with stale content. Hence, creating constant content is to keep the audience engaged and Google happy.
- Not Highlighting CTAs: CTAs keep users happy. Most people admit that they look for CTAs at the end of a content-filled page to tell them what to do. CTAs aren’t just important for business, they are your business. They are your sales funnels that guide visitors to subscribe, to engage and to buy into your brand. Making CTAs the focal point of your sales pitch forces the audience to get into it. It’s more of a mind-game, really. The more you tell a person what to do, the more they will be encouraged to do it. Hence, a carefully crafted and placed CTA is bound to increase the chances of visitor engagement.
- Keyword Stuffing: Overloading a web page with relevant and irrelevant keyword to increase the chances of ranking is keyword stuffing. Any phrase generated just by a bunch of keywords and no proper sentence structure is also known as “unethical SEO practice”. Google algorithms monitor a web page for keywords used and if it results in a keyword used repeatedly and forcefully, it will lower your search result ranking. Ignoring CTAs and listing out keywords on your website not only disappoints Google, but also the visitors. Stuffing looks unnatural and out of place.
- Proofreading and Typos: This importance of this point should speak for itself. A grammatically or structurally incorrect sentence is a turn-off for any reader. Hire a proofreader for your blog posts or your website copy. A higher quality of content is maintained with a typo-free and properly proofread texts. While it keeps the audience engaged with the content you update, it also helps you drastically improve your writing.
- Including Images, Infographics, Stats: All text and no pictures, makes for a sore reader. Keep your content interesting and instead of just typing down words after words, post some pictures and relevant infographics in between paragraphs. Convert the written information into graphics. This way, the audience pays more attention to what you want to say. Including more statistics and numbers increases your credibility, say content marketing agencies India. If you’re citing a study or research, refer to the original source. The readers tend to believe more to a number they read if they see a proof with it.
- Respecting the Diverse Audience and its Needs: It is because of your audience that you are what you are. Without your readers and your subscribers, your business wouldn’t flourish. Which is why you should be respectful towards all sections of the society. Steer clear off offending any class, group or gender. Hurting a particular community will not only result in loss of audience from that group but others too. Not to forget, insensitive comments may even lead to unnecessary legal cases.
- Consumer Research: If you don’t know what your audience wants, how will you sell to them? The area you are planning to target, research the people living there, research their lifestyle, their wants and needs. You cannot sell school supplies at an old-age home. Consumer research will reveal to you all the necessary details of what and where your business should be. It should be part of the blueprint before you decide to launch.
Take a long, hard look at all the above common design and content mistakes that most businesses make. Go over your websites and make sure you’re not one of them. If you need help, consult with some good content writing services in India before you actually delve into it.