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There is no question about it: We live in an attention economy. In other words, the most important thing to most people these days isn’t money, but it’s time. That means that graphic designers have to work harder than ever in order to maintain the attention of people viewing their products. As such, here are five graphic design mistakes that you simply must avoid for business websites.
5 design mistakes to avoid
Having Too Busy a Design
When someone looks at a webpage or graphic, they expect a design that is clean, crisp, and easy to comprehend. This means that the colors work well together, that the font is easy to read, and that the design isn’t too busy or distracting. Too many effects can create too much of a challenge in this area, and that is why a design cannot be too busy.
Failing to Account for Multiple Mediums
These days, website viewing is not just done on a computer, of course, and more and more people are viewing documents and graphics on their phones or tablets. While this adds incredible complications to the design process, it goes without saying that designers must account for multiple mediums in their graphics.
As such, anyone designing a website must take into account how a graphic or web page will look when it is viewed on a phone, tablet, or traditional computer.
Selecting the Wrong Colors
Every graphic has a need for a new color scheme that best fits the information it is trying to convey, and your design must reflect those colors.
Make sure to get all of the information on the brand you are designing for, and create a graphic that not only reflects this brand but best markets it.
Failure to Proofread
You can have the greatest design in the world, use perfect colors, and have ideal formatting, but it won’t matter one iota if you have an obnoxious typo in your design. To correct this, make sure that you scan your entire graphic, repeatedly, in order to check for typos or grammar errors. You can also ask someone else to give your design a once-over. Additionally, you may want to run all of the text through a program like Grammarly. These programs often catch spelling or grammar errors that you missed.
Failure to Know Your Audience
Remember, each graphic is different – it has a different audience, a different goal, and a different selling point. This means that you have to take the tastes and desires of your audience into account in terms of color, graphics, and overall message. You cannot sell a pet grooming service the same way you would sell a nightclub, and your design must reflect these obvious changes.
Fortunately, while these mistakes can be hugely problematic, they are all relatively easy to avoid: All it takes is the right website design software such as Adobe XD, a little bit of knowledge about how to use it, and the time to make sure you are giving a job the attention it deserves.
Design mistakes that are common on business websites
A great business site can easily become one of the most valuable tools for your company. It can strengthen the connection to consumers, it can offer them more convenience than any face-to-face interaction, and it can drive a lot more sales and turn many of those on-the-fence visitors into customers. We’re going to look at the cardinal sins of website design that ensure your site won’t be doing that.
Confusion
If people get on your site and immediately have no idea what to do next, you’re going to lose valuable traffic. Bad navigation is a staple of bad design and very often seen. You need to think about slimming it down if your front page is just full of links. Divide different pages into categories so you’re not throwing them at people all at once and offering them more choice than they know what to do with. Don’t clog pages up with content. Make sure it has enough to fulfil its purpose and no more.
Blandness
As confusing as a site with links all over the place and content in every pixel is the site that looks like it doesn’t know what it’s for. Good website design and branding is all about knowing exactly what you want to communicate and making it a visual style. Imagery and video marketing can communicate better than content can. A site can look sleek and professional, warm and friendly, bright and creative. You need to consult your branding voice and find the style to fit it on business websites.
Abandonment
The site isn’t just done when it’s done. It needs to be updated, whether that’s through content or a cycling front page. If you find it hard to update your site, look into installing a dynamic content management system that makes it easier for the layman to change up a site. Otherwise, it will look like a ghost town to visitors. They won’t be sure if anyone’s home and might decide against getting in contact or trying to buy something.
Invisibility
Promoting the business is essential. The site is a promotional tool so you should be promoting it too. Search engine optimization and content creation can make it a lot more likely for web users to find it organically. At the same time, you should be sharing new content, new deals, pages of interest with landing pages through social media channels. Don’t let your site fade into obscurity or you make it likely that your business will do the same.
Lack of direction
If your site’s navigation is good, but customers don’t know where to go, you need to think about how you give them direction on business websites. Calls-to-action and highlighting the most attractive aspects of the site’s design can be performed through conversion rate optimization. That makes a site even more convincing when it comes to making sales online.
If only we could consign all the sites that do the above to website hell, but unfortunately, we’re going to have to deal with them clogging up the internet for now. After reading the above, we can hopefully expect that you’re going to reform your ways and become a business website saint.
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