Having a website that is compelling and unique is the only way to go today. This is due to expectations and standards, as poorly designed websites can cause a website to lose traffic, which in turn means less site revenue. The unfortunate reality is that this is a very common scenario. Many business owners want a website that is cheap, as they hope to pump the vast majority of their funds into the business itself. Not knowing the fundamentals of a Well Designed Website can result in less ideal results for your website.

Web design is essentially an art, which means, a website should be designed like a work of art, with the intention of creating an appropriate experience. A well-designed website is one that merges several functions, such as navigation, intrigue, and enjoyment. In order to successfully do this, there are a number of rules that the designer must follow. In cases where the designer does not follow these rules, the outcome is typically a website that doesn’t fulfill its end goal.

You don’t want your website to fit into that category. From my own personal experience, I can say the mistakes listed below, are the most commonly made, by new designers.

Read Top 5 Common Mistakes Novice Site Designers Make

Cross-Browser Compatibility

When you create your images in your photo editing program, like Photoshop, your work is typically fixed to a specific height and width, however, with internet browsers, everything is dependent on the dimensions that the visitor has set. This can cause problems, when dealing with things, such as background images.

When you apply for the services of a professional, they will already be aware of the cross-browser compatibility issues, and will thus, make a site that works equally the same on all the major browsers, such as Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. This essentially means the site will always look the same, irrespective of the user’s monitor size or whether they’ve zoomed in or out by 150% magnification.

It’s important that a designer makes no attempt to inhibit the natural behavior of a web browser. If you make everything fixed to one particular dimension, then you’re going to stumble upon problems when you reset your browser size window – so think about that.

A Poor CTA (Call to Action)

Your CTA is an integral element of your website. Its sole purpose is to ensure that your visitors carry out the action(s) you’ve laid out for them. Whether it’s to click on something, or get a special offer, or to find additional information on a product. However, in order for this to work, and work well, your CTA must be clear and concise. Your CTA should provide the visitor with enough information so that they know what they are going to get, and what they will need to provide, in return.

You want your CTA to come across as helpful. So be sure to make everything as clear as possible, so there’s no ambiguity about what the visitor should be doing. If the specified action is to fill out a form, then you’ll want to keep that kind of stuff to a minimum (as it can annoy), you also want to give the visitor some time on the site, before the CTA pops up.

Not using relevant H1, H2, H3 tags

A lot of website owners request that their site look as visually appealing as possible, however, it’s important they realize that a search engine needs text to read, which is in turn, uses when ranking pages. An example of where this can be a disservice is when a web designer creates an actual heading image, rather than using text and an H1 tag. Obviously, the website designer can use the Alt tag, to give the search engine some kind of idea what the image is about, but the reality is, that the search engines place far more emphasizes on H1, H2, and H3 tags, used throughout an article.

Another thing to consider when adopting that approach – of using images for your headings. Is that, if you have a website that has a considerable amount of pages, it can be quite an arduous task, having to construct images for each individual page on your site.

Poor Use of Whitespace and Content

Content is the most important part of any website and of any websites marketing efforts. It’s the content that you will use to let your visitors know what your site is all about. If it’s a sales site, then the content will naturally list all your products and/or services on offer. You need to pay a great deal of addition to font usage and content structure.

You want your font to be attractive but also easy to read. You don’t want users having to strain, just to read words on your site, so think more about practicality and function, when choosing your font. You also want to properly utilize whitespace on your site, as this makes your content much easier to read. It also makes the site look more comforting and easier on the eyes. Having too much or too little text is typically a mistake, on either side of the spectrum. Make sure your content is properly structured, by breaking it up into paragraphs and use images to represent content as often as possible. You also want to ensure that your content is always kept up-to-date and relevant.

Using Animation effects

When constructing your website, there is a range of issues for you to consider. JavaScript effects such as rollovers, may or may not work on certain browsers, depending on how they are coded. Animations are invisible to search engines, so you want to limit the amount of information you put in them.

All in all, this kind of information should be made public knowledge so that you, and whomever you may be designing a website for, are aware of their boundaries.