13+ Mistakes You Didn’t Know You Were Making On Your Website
We all think we know what's best for us...and in most instances we're right. But when it comes to your website, we're sorry to be the ones to tell you this, but you probably have no idea what's best.
We get it - Your website, just like your business, is your baby. You started it, you invested in it, and you nurtured its growth. So you're probably confident that you know exactly how the website should be designed, what colors to use, and how the layout should look.
Well you would be wrong.
Because right there you're making the biggest mistake of all - thinking that your website is about you. It's not! It's about your customers and their needs.
Now don't get us wrong, we want your input. We want you to be involved, and for your website to be the best digital representation of your brand it can be. Having said that, and at the risk of further sounding like pretentious assholes, we need you to step back and let us do what we do best.
What we do best is help you get out of your own way. If we can accomplish that, we can build you something your customers and potential customers can truly find value in.
As experts in our industry, we know what it takes to create something usable and engaging. We can tell you that putting more pictures of cats on your homepage because "everybody loves cats" is probably a bad idea...and that using yellow text on a white background so it's better visible in the dark, is definitely a bad idea.
Some other big no-no's we've seen include...
- Music that automatically plays when you enter a site
- Generic images pulled straight from Google (bonus points if they have a watermark)
- Not a single social sharing button in sight
- FLASH! (Kill it and burn it with fire!)
- Text, text, words, text, more words, and too much text.
- Contact pages that just list contact information
- Using a dozen different fonts and font colors throughout the site
- Visitor counters
- QR codes on your website (this one really grinds our gears)
- Disorienting animations
- Catchy, yet utterly useless and uninformative menu options and titles
- Choosing clutter over whitespace
- Outdated elements and broken links (There are no excuses)
We trust that you're an expert at what you do, and that means you would rather people come to you for solutions than struggle to solve them on their own. The same goes for us. Most people underestimate the fragility and precision that comes with building a successful website and it's easy to make a mess of it when you lack the expertise.
We're creatives, designers, developers, and marketers - let us be the ones to create, design, develop, and market.