The web design industry is ever-changing with new trends coming and going. Poor web design can cost a business thousands in lost revenue, with the number never really being known for sure.

Calgary, AB -- (SBWire) -- 11/07/2014 --Without proper insights it can be difficult to tell if visitors to our website are engaging with our web design. This is where Google Analytics comes in handy. Free to use, Google Analytics provides business owners the ability to see various metrics from their actual website results. It highlights things like bounce and exit rates that can show where we are losing our customers. If our homepage has a high bounce rate (anything above the 70% mark) then we should consider re-evaluating our design and/or content.

There are a number of things that can off-put visitors to our site and be losing our business potential sales. Below we highlight 5 of the most common website design mistake we’ve come across. Most websites are guilty of at least one of these, but they’re also easy fixes and shouldn’t be left unresolved.

Poor User Experience

Navigating through a website should never be an overwhelming experience. The navigation should be featured in an easily accessible location on the site, with clear headings for each new page. Visitors to our website are looking for useful information and want to access this in the most timely manner, the more time-consuming or confusing it becomes the more likely our visitors will leave our website and not return.

A common practice is to feature the menu in a visable location, towards the top of the page. Avoid ambiguous names for web pages that do not clearly define what the page features.

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Hiding Important Information

This one varies from site to site depending on our business. If we have an eCommerce site the shopping cart should be featured permanently on each page of our website, normally in the top right hand corner of the page. If we sell any type of service or product our contact details should never be difficult to find, ensure we have this information highlighted through our website.

Broken Links

This happens more often than we’d think. Broken links makes a website look outdated and unmaintained. Whether a link has been moved or removed it leaves our visitors with no place to go. Checking for broken links is easier than we’d think, there are a handful of Free Online Broken Links Checker that’ll do the hard work for us. Submit our site, find all the broken links and get onto fixing them right away.

Low-Quality Or Stock Images

Let’s start with low-quality images. Websites showcasing poor quality, pixilated images aren’t helping their reputation one bit. Our website is for most customers the face of your business, so putting time into quality images is necessary to portray a solid representation of what you do.

On the other hand there’s those all-too-common stock images. Although they have superior quality they are also easily recognisable as stock images and don’t do much for our businesses branding. It may be worth investing in a quality camera or the skills of a corporate photographer to take professional photos of your business and using these instead. Trust me, these will give us much more credit than generic stock photos.

Old, Irrelevant Content

This again is one that seems to happen all too often. Whether it’s an old promotion still highlighted on our homepage, or content that just hasn’t been updated in years. Providing new and current content, alongside relevant updates shows that our proactive in our business. Not to mention Google loves new content – so the more the better! A great way to regularly feature new content is through a blog or business news section on your site, it’s easy to set-up and can be updated as often as we like.

Wrap Up

Web design trends come and go, but one thing will remain constant and that’s a well maintained and functional website. We’ve only highlighted 5 of the more common mistakes we come across, sure there are many more we can add to this list but these are a good place to start. If we think of any other common mistakes we’ve missed please add them to the comments section below .

About Red Cherry
We are a digital marketing and software agency that stands out from all other agencies. Our team of talented and creative individuals work closely with us to deliver rich and engaging solutions that drive qualified traffic to our website and convert that traffic into sales. Red Cherry has offices in both Kelowna, BC and Calgary, AB. We work closely with them to develop a comprehensive digital marketing campaign for Facebook, Google, Twitter, Remarketing (largest ad network), Pay Per Click, SEO, and more. Providing website design in Calgary for over 10 years.

We are also a full scale software development firm specializing in web development and apps development.

Let's chat 888-401-6668 or visit http://www.redcherryinc.ca/