Creating Your Own Website: 5 Mistakes to Avoid

Whether it be in a personal or business capacity, building your own website is an important part of growing your brand and ensuring that you have a presence online. However, while it’s relatively straightforward to whip up a website, there are some principles to follow and pitfalls to avoid in order to make the most effective website. So, before you jump into imagining your website layout, here are the 5 common mistakes to avoid when designing your site.

Avoid overwhelming design elements

While it can be tempting to make your website as ‘fancy’ as possible, the real goal is to showcase yourself or your business, and do so in a sophisticated, clear, and simple way. Overwhelming amounts of information, text, and vivid colours can cause users to feel inundated, so stick to a basic design with unique elements to highlight your offerings, product, or service, rather than an overelaborate and convoluted design.

No call-to-action or bad user direction

Your website needs to convey your business, but you also want to generate an action from it – whether that be an email, lead generation, purchase, or phone-call. Additionally, people often have confusing call-to-action buttons where the message just isn’t clear, so stick to bolder text, one main call-to-action request, and don’t ask for too much information from your users.

Non-responsive site

Having your site be mobile-friendly isn’t just an add-on, it’s now a necessity. With over 90% of people accessing the web via mobile or another smart device, not having a responsive or mobile-friendly site can be your Achilles heel and end up losing you traffic, and in turn, customers. Always make sure your site is 100% responsive by choosing a great site builder to create your website, such as WordPress.

Ignoring customer journey

There’s two clear features that any good website should have: simple navigation and great content. Ensuring that visitors know where they’re clicking and trying to go on your website, along with some great complimentary content, will help you turn those users into customers.

Lack of SEO

SEO may seem like a complicated feature to have on your website, but it’s more about ensuring that your website loads quickly, features clear and concise copy which resembles your offering or business, and having a friendly and easily-searchable website for Google’s bots to scan. Utilising a website builder which feature SEO-ready templates is a good idea to ensure your site is built correctly from the get-go.