Your website is one of the most crucial elements of your marketing strategy. A poorly designed website can not only have a significant negative impact on your brand, it also has the potential to cost your business thousands of dollars in lost sales.
A well-designed website will be better equipped to provide your customers with a great user experience, which leads to increased conversions and ultimately increased sales.
When looking to design a website that will help increase your company’s bottom line, try to avoid these costly mistakes:
1. Ignoring Your Target Audience
One of the most important factors to take into consideration when designing your website is your target audience. Although your website should impress and help distinguish your brand from the competition, its main purpose is to speak to your customers. This is why it’s essential to take their needs into account throughout the entire web development process. When your website is designed with your customers in mind, it will provide them with a more enjoyable and valuable user experience.
2. Overdoing The Design
A cluttered or crowded design can do a major disservice to your website. Using too many design elements can be distracting and cause frustration when users are unable to easily find what they’re looking for. These types of designs can come off as unprofessional and disorganized, and can cause the user to embrace these same negative feelings towards your brand. When it comes to design elements for a website, a good rule of thumb is to use them in the same way you would spend money, which for most would be carefully and with purpose.
3. Missing Calls to Action
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are designed to prompt users to take a desired action. When properly designed and placed in optimal areas of a website, these actions help users navigate through a website and motivate them to continue down the conversion funnel until they ultimately become a paying customer. Business owners who feel they are not generating the desired results from their websites are often missing this fundamental component. When a website is missing CTAs, the business is missing out on a window of opportunity to convert visitors into customers.
4. Hiring the Wrong Web Design Company
Many businesses do not realize the importance of selecting a professional web design firm to handle their web development initiatives. This may be one of the most common and costly marketing mistakes a business can make. Selecting the right Tampa web design company can mean the difference between having a professional website that helps improve your brand and facilitate new business, or ending up with a poorly designed product that could cost you thousands of dollars and a great deal of time to fix. To get it right the first time and maximize your return on investment, choose a company that specializes in professional web design and also has a great track record.
5. Doing it Yourself
When it comes to having a professional website designed for your business, this task is better left to the professionals. It may seem enticing at first to save a little money upfront by doing it yourself. However, when considering the damage that a DIY website can cause to your brand and reputation, the intangible costs far outweigh the financial cost of hiring a professional Tampa web design company to deliver an effective website that improves your corporate image and attracts, rather than deters potential customers.
