A website is a digital business card. For many companies, the website is a fundamental tool to present themselves to the outside world. In order for a website to be convincing for the visitor, certain rules must be respected and mistakes that can have a considerable impact must be avoided.
Mistake #1: overloaded website design
Design is a primary factor in the process of creating a professional website. If information is presented without paying attention to its graphic appearance and structure, there is little chance of capturing the visitor's attention and even less chance of keeping them on the page. On the other hand, by focusing on a too original design of the website, one risks to neglect other important aspects.
A classic mistake is the use of too many different fonts or font sizes, hard-to-read color combinations or excessively bright colors. This is especially problematic when the design deviates from the actual content or information, or contrasts sharply with the company's image. This last aspect in particular could lead the visitor to question the professionalism and reliability of your company.
Mistake #2: Difficulty to navigate the website
Usability is an often overlooked aspect of professional website design. User experience is not only an important factor in user satisfaction, but it is often decisive in determining whether the visitor will open and view all content or online offerings as they wish. It is therefore all the more surprising that many websites present themselves with complicated navigation menus and unnecessary technical complexities that simply make it more difficult to explore the pages.
The main mistake here is almost always a lack of clarity of priorities. Too much content is considered important, giving the whole thing a wide berth. The consequence is that a large number of menus and sub-menus end up confusing the visitor instead of guiding him through the site. The same applies to the use of interactive elements. Experience shows that if they are inserted in an inappropriate place or in an excessive number in your web project, they generate a feeling of unease in the user who will quickly move away from them.
Mistake #3: not updating the website
One of the mistakes that, even if it is not committed at the time of the creation of the web page but is nevertheless linked to the design of a web project, is the absence of update. In particular, when a company's website presents information in the form of blogs or news on the homepage, it certainly does not look good if the last entry was a few years ago. The website's homepage should reflect changes in the company's structure or design. The same goes, of course, for new products or brands, hours of operation, prices, contact information, etc.
If the website has recreational content, you should also make sure to update it. You should pay special attention to internal and external links as well as external media content included in your pages.
Mistake #4: Not following the law
The legal regulations that affect a professional website are much more complex than many people think. Again, ignorance of the law does not protect you from penalties. For example, non-compliance with the rules on cookies, tracking tools and social plug-ins, as well as violation of data protection legislation following the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), are quite serious offenses. Using text, images, music and movies without a license or permission from the owner can also be costly.
Mistake #5: Not having a mobile version of the website
The share of traffic coming from mobile devices is increasing every year. All the more reason to be surprised that there are still so many companies that do not optimize their online presence for smartphones and tablets by not adopting a responsive design of their websites. The result is that these pages are then difficult to view and use on mobile devices. Since Google, the leading search engine, also favors mobile-optimized sites, the lack of this feature also has a negative impact on search result rankings, and this is like many technical bases.
Mistake #6: Failure to optimize load times
A common mistake when creating a professional website is not optimizing the load times of individual pages. This often results in poor loading speed that annoys the visitor and causes a high bounce rate on the site, thus negatively affecting search engine results. The big difficulty here is that website performance problems always depend on many different causes.
Being able to identify these problems and solve them can be a significant investment of time and energy, even for the most experienced administrators. A long loading time can be caused, for example, by insufficient server resources, excessively heavy source code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), uncompressed images, the inclusion of external content or the absence of absolutely necessary caching mechanisms.
Error #7: Data transfer without SSL/TLS encryption
For most web users, security is an important issue, especially when transmitting confidential data such as passwords, addresses or bank details. One of the most serious mistakes that can be made when creating a professional website is therefore not paying attention to the protection of user data, for example by relying on an SSL/TLS certificate. In this case, files are transferred via HTTP protocol which offers no protection and therefore allows hackers to read and manipulate the data.
Browsers help recognize websites that do not have an SSL/TLS certificate by displaying the message "The connection to this website is not secure". At this point, the page is not in a favorable position. Search engines such as Google do not tolerate such careless handling of user data either and punish the pages in question with a poor ranking.
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