Designing websites is often challenging because you not only have to cater to your audience but also make sure that the strategies you use help you optimize the blog. This article discusses some essential things to avoid and what to do instead.
What Makes a Bad Website Design for Search Engines?
When you run a website, there are numerous things you have to keep in mind. Web designers often have a crucial job – they have to guarantee that what they incorporate into the web design is effective.
Even though there are many web design companies, on some occasions, designers keep making the same mistakes. They might make unappealing designs, try ineffective strategies, or add unnecessary things that do not help your SEO.
Your user interface should balance different aspects, otherwise, your marketing efforts will be in vain. To make sure that the layout helps the SEO strategies, the web design company has to constantly revise the methods that it uses to create the design. If that doesn’t occur, then there’s a risk of it not helping the website.
In some cases, it’s not about the web design company making mistakes or creating a poor design. Sometimes, it’s just that the designer uses a bad trend – something that people once believed to work but now everyone knows it doesn’t.
When that happens, the best idea is to talk to the web design company representative (or the designer himself) and try to avoid using those old trends.
Why Should You Care about Search Engine Optimization?
If you are in the web design industry or the online marketing world, you might have heard of the term ‘search engine optimization’ or SEO.
Digital marketing includes many factors, but SEO is one of the most important ones for web pages. It’s what allows you to rank high on Google, which drives website traffic to your site and gets you more subscribers. Eventually, your audience can turn into your clients.
Web design is essential for SEO because it’s the first thing that your visitors see when they go to your site. Your user interface design must be appealing enough to make the person want to come back to your site.
At the same time, a responsive design helps you rank higher on search engines because the algorithm understands that your site is optimized.
Five Trends Web Designers Should Avoid When Working on a Web Page
As was mentioned before, some trends don’t work at all. Unfortunately, many web designers don’t know this, which is why understanding it is essential – if you’re aware of it, you can make sure that you incorporate it into any particular website.
When you work with a marketing company, you must make sure that the results you get fit your needs.
Small business owners are often timid when it comes to expressing their needs to the web designer, but they shouldn’t be. Graphic design is a collaborative process, and it requires you to explain what you want so that the website functions properly.
Thus, when you have an online brand, the visual elements should be harmonious. There are some trends that you should avoid in website development, and the most crucial ones are the following:
Pop-ups
Some people believe that pop-up ads help drive traffic to your website. However, this is completely false.
Pop-ups are a UX design mistake, and unfortunately, people still use them today. Ask yourself this: what do you usually do when you get a pop-up? Exactly. You probably quickly scan it to find the ‘X’ button.
On many occasions, pop-ups hinder you from driving online traffic to your site. Instead of making your target audience subscribe to your newsletter or take advantage of your sale, it might make them go away.
If you want users to sign up for your newsletter or pay attention to specific sales on your site, UX designers should incorporate other strategies, preferably some that add to the visual appeal of your website.
Flash Intros
A flash intro is a short animation that plays before your audience can actually access your website. These videos were popular some years ago because designers saw them as a way to catch people’s attention with a flare.
Nonetheless, you have to keep in mind that nowadays, people’s attention span is very short. Everyone wants instant gratification, and they can’t get that if they have to spend some time watching a random animated video before accessing the site.
Web design is also about making sure that your audience stays with you. If you don’t do that, then they might not even get to enjoy the written content (articles) on your site.
Auto-play Videos
These videos work similarly to flash intros. Once you open web browsers and go into a site, the video starts playing, sometimes loudly.
You have probably experienced the awkwardness and embarrassment of being in a public place and having a loud video unexpectedly play when you’re trying to open a site.
Today’s world goes by very fast and people’s attention span is specific, so whatever you do with your web design should reflect that. It’s not only about the visual design of your site – but it’s also about making sure that the strategies you use to benefit your marketing strategies.
Most people open different websites from their mobile devices, so they might be in public when they go into your blog. No one really likes videos unexpectedly playing when they don’t want to, so using auto-play videos is a big no in terms of guaranteeing a user-friendly experience.
Stock Photos
Before you get scared, no, this doesn’t mean that you can’t ever use stock photos. However, there are some instances in which you should avoid them.
Your website has different pages. If you want to improve user experience and make sure that first-time visitors come back, user testing is vital, but that’s not the only important thing.
To give off a good impression, websites must use unique photos on their most crucial pages, especially when they’re small businesses.
Although interaction design is fun, web design is often more straightforward than that. To have an adaptive design, you must use unique photos on your website. You can use stock photos on your posts, but make sure that you invest in a top-notch photographer to take care of the rest of the images on your blog.
Parallax Scrolling Done the Wrong Way
A good web design often includes parallax scrolling, but you have to do it right if you want more visitors.
Designing mobile apps or RSS feeds is completely different from the web design of your website. In these cases, you have to make sure that the strategies you incorporate don’t hinder your SEO.
If you don’t do parallax scrolling the right way, it might increase load time, slow your website down, make it challenging for your users to visualize the website from mobile, and completely hinder analytics.
What to Incorporate into Your Website Design
Testing your website is an iterative process. Overall, web design refers to all the strategies you use to create the visual appearance of your blog, so you must test again and again to evaluate whether or not the methods are working.
There are some strategies that you can use in your UX design. Choosing the right color schemes, screen size, and layout often helps you have an online presence that stands out.
At the same time, there are other good practice strategies that you can incorporate, regardless of whether your audience uses Internet Explorer or any other browser to visualize your UX design. User experience is one of the most crucial factors when you create a website, so you must make sure that users are content. Here are some ideas you might want to consider:
Eyecatching Illustrations
Everyone loves illustrations. User experience design should always include some that fit the color scheme of your website since these can help catch people’s eyes.
Clients might not know anything about UX design, but for your business to stand out, you have to guarantee that you’re creating something visually appealing.
Color and Negative Space
The article previously mentioned it, but using white space in your layout shows that you care about the functionality and cleanliness of your layout.
Although this idea does not help with the technology development of your website (it’s not, for example, a way to improve the internal linking of your blog), it still helps you build your online presence in the industry.
The Bottom Line
Creating relevant web design solutions requires the ability to be creative and incorporate usability strategies that help customers understand that you have high-quality content to offer.
Data shows that there are trends all around the world, but after a deep dive into some of them, you might notice that not all of them work for your brand. When you work with a client, you must make sure that you unlock your blog’s full potential and spark the person’s interest, so use the best methods only.