The website is the backbone, or it acts as a gateway for any business. A unique, compelling, and research-based website design can help your business succeed online. At the same time, a drab and imperfect website can affect the loss of customers and revenue.
So, before you start building a new website or redesigning your existing website, all businesses need to be aware of some website design mistakes to avoid in 2022.
Most companies seek to work with an experienced WordPress web design company as their experience will help create a flawless website that works well in all aspects. If you want to create one, it’s essential to identify the most common website design mistakes most designers and companies make.
In addition, we will also highlight some of the essential points why businesses need a good website design. So make sure you stay at the end of this article to find out some untold facts.
What is a web design, and why is it crucial?
Web design is an iterative process of strategizing, conceptualizing, and delivering information and standard business functionality aesthetically pleasing.
The visual components of web design include images, text content, colors, videos, fonts, different elements and shapes like forms, buttons, icons, the spacing between these elements, and the overall design itself.
Design functionality includes website speed, navigation, Animation, User Experience, User Interaction, General Website Technology Architecture, SEO, Cross-Browser, Cross-Platform, Website Consistency, Cross-Device Design, and Responsiveness.
Now that we’ve covered web design and why it’s so important, it’s time to understand the most common web design mistakes designers and developers need to avoid in 2022.
Website Design Mistakes to Avoid in 2022
However, these tips won’t work most of the time because there are other flaws in your website design. So, if you want to grow your website traffic, leads, and sales, you must avoid making mistakes made by most website design companies, especially their competitors.
Correcting these errors will not make your website or your business skyrocket. However, you can improve your website’s online visibility and make other strategies more effective and impactful. So, let’s start by examining various mistakes you can avoid in 2022.
Don’t prioritize intuitive navigation and accessibility
Skipping the essential step of brainstorming, site mapping, and schema creation is the basis of several web design mistakes. One of the most noticeable is the misconfigured menu and navigation layout.
An inappropriate navigation structure can drive your website away. Visitors, as it is tedious to scroll through haphazardly structured websites. Assuming you are designing a website with many pages, it makes sense to group them into categories and organize them hierarchically to navigate the website intuitively.
Also, navigation is not the same for all devices. Although there are different ways to work with navigation, you need to choose the appropriate strategy. For example, if you’re working on mobile, you might select a hamburger menu strategy because it’s great for navigating smaller screens.
In addition to navigation, there are other aspects to improve the accessibility of the site. According to research, more than 300 million people have color blindness. But most designers overlook this aspect when designing websites and user journey’s disabilities.
Not including these users in your design thinking approach could be the most crucial and common website design mistake. It includes Text size, color contrasts, page titles, image alt text, keyboard accessibility, moving and blinking content such as carousels, ads, autoplay videos, news feeds.
Scrolling and tickers are critical components of a website from an accessibility perspective. A person struggling with farsightedness may want to magnify content on small devices. A visually impaired person may prefer speech to consume content rather than text.
An attention deficit user may want to pause the carousels etc., on the image to improve site accessibility. A mistake can lead to a poor user experience and harm your business.
Failing to Create a Hierarchical Aesthetic Strategy
Another web design mistake that most web designers must avoid is failing to create a visual hierarchy of content, including CTAs. Designing efficient graphic orders: colors, images, and small animations can efficiently implement a well-designed user journey.
The spacing between these elements and their size can also be crucial to encourage user interaction.
Not going with the design thinking approach before implementation
One of the most repeated web design mistakes most designers make is not realizing the importance of design thinking and drawing the design on paper.
Designers often tend to “assume” about users rather than doing extensive “user research” to understand users’ needs. But that’s not the right way to approach web design.
Understanding the design thinking approach is key to designing addictive user experiences. Design thinking is a process of understanding and identifying customers’ needs and motivations. It’s a mentality to empathize with customers and describe their problems in detail and develop solutions to resolve them.
The design thinking approach permits designers to identify goals and project scope, create business functions, understand user requirements, technology capabilities, solution feasibility, and effectiveness.
This helps designers gather data points to design the proper sitemaps and layouts before jumping into design software.
Remember, if you don’t understand your customers, you can’t design good websites for them. So be empathetic and research users to understand what is essential to your customers.
Failure to comply with Security First, Responsive Design Approach
Although website security is an aspect that is heavily dependent on technical architecture, it is also, to some extent, related to website design and user experiences.
Website security is prioritized from the design phase, avoiding many security vulnerabilities. For example, they place important business data behind authentication and payment walls.
In addition to security, the design needs to be responsive and consistent across browsers and devices to deliver an omnichannel experience. One of the big web design mistakes when developing websites is designing different user journeys and roadmaps for other devices and platforms.
The precedence should be to maintain as much consistency as possible between devices. Please check responsiveness before posting.
Not possessing a clear Call to Action
Not having a clear CTA is another usual web design mistake. Websites are like a marketing and sales funnel or pipeline. Your website visitor moves through this funnel from the prospect stage to the converted location.
A clear “call to action” in the right places can result in many attractive prospects not converting. Overdoing the CTA can also lead to irritating opportunities.
Overloaded web design with too much content
Too little information and you risk not providing the answer your user is gazing for. Too many details, and you may end up creating a solution that is difficult to understand, use or achieve.
In their sheer desperation, designers can overwhelm visitors with resources and end up delivering a very cluttered website. However, it is successful because it is viral from the start. And maybe they haven’t changed the website’s design yet to keep consistency for their users.
But the same mistake should not be made. One of the most common web design errors to avoid is not creating scalable designs from the start. This is the leading cause why so many companies overhaul their website structure.
Templates and unstructured website designs are a growth bottleneck because these websites become falsely challenging to maintain, develop, and scale after a few hundred pages. The design approach must adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy to avoid these design scalability issues.
Divide the public interface of the website into different web pages like product list, product information, user profiles, user interaction, etc. Next, divide the front-end components of each web page into reusable blocks and segments.
Each of these components should focus on providing functionality. For example, use carousels, profiles from short users, product descriptions, reviews, etc., not these components to build the general website.
Abysmally designed or unconnected images
We all know that graphics and images are crucial for web design. Ideas can get the message across to the visitor if done correctly. Whereas, if done incorrectly, they can bemuse the reader. Many companies still don’t notice their images and use low-quality and irrelevant photos.
Don’t make this error, as low-quality images will spoil your website and turn off your visitors, hurting your conversions. Similarly, irrelevant images will confuse your visitors and trick them into not taking the desired action.
However, you should also not overload your website with too many photos, as they can distract attention from the CTA and lead to lost conversions.
Don’t Prioritize Grids and Columns
We all know that the world of web design is changing at a remarkable rate, and you must change with it. They only use flexbox, float, breakpoints, etc., and overlook the importance of CSS grids and guides in developing well-structured, responsive website designs.
On the other hand, many junior developers believe that flexbox and floats are dead. It is a misunderstanding. CSS grids, flexboxes, floats, and breakpoints are all important from a web designer’s perspective, and using them properly can help avoid all grid and column-related web design mistakes.
CSS technologies enable designers to provide a seamless user experience where content is automatically segmented and aligned using rows and columns.
Grid-template-columns, min-max, CSS autofit properties eliminate the need to use breakpoints for media queries, but using grid template areas requires the use of breakpoints.
Most designers make one CSS grid-related web design mistake by confusing them with CSS numbers. When designing for CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, we count the number of columns in a row, usually 12, but in the grid system, rows or stacks count.
In the grid system, going from rows 1 to 7 is similar to spanning six columns.
No Language-Driven Multilingual Website Design
Today it is possible to create websites in multiple languages and even add language-based features. But not many website designers and owners use these web features.
If a company has customers in different countries, native language websites can be developed to attract target customers better. A language-based interface can be added to the website to improve accessibility.
A large portion of Google searches on phones are based on voice. Users use voice technology to book taxis, hotels, etc. It would be a blunder not to incorporate the mouthpiece and multilingual approach into the site’s overall design.
With customers in different countries in mind, you may be interested in learning how your website can look and function differently in other countries and continents and how to run cross-browser geolocation tests over VPN in LambdaTest.
Wrapping up
A website can be your company’s most important asset, so you need to design it flawlessly to make a good first impression. But to do that, you need to avoid these web design mistakes.
These common website design mistakes are pretty easy to avoid and fix. Identifying them is the most challenging step. But now that you are aware of these errors, you can easily prevent or correct them in the future. I hope you found this helpful.
