So much goes into designing a website. Photography, copywriting, branding, and of course all of the design options!

More platforms are making it easier to design your own website (my favorite is Squarespace!), which is wonderful, but it can also be overwhelming.

Whether you designed your own website or had someone do it for you, be sure it avoids these ten things.

Being overly showy and anti-informative

Not telling people what you do

I see this a lot with creative service providers and artists (I’m looking at you, photographers!). You have a gorgeous website that represents your body of work and links to a contact page with no incentive for anyone to actually contact you. What do you do? What can someone gain from your offer? How much will it cost?

If people don’t know what you offer, they won’t take action to work with you.

I understand the nature of being a brooding artist, but if you don’t want to be a starving one, communicate.

Confusing navigation

There’s been a trend to be quirky with page names. While I’m all for being clever and crafty, it’s more important to be clear and concise. Your navigation is literally how people navigate your website, and you want to make sure those page names at the top are easy to scan and easy to understand.

Use one-word, concrete descriptions whenever possible. It’s easier to scan Services, Portfolio, and Contact than it is to scan What I Do, My Work, and Work With Me.

Cluttered navigation

Branching off the above, I recommend having no more than five menu items in your main navigation. Any more than that and people are likely to be overwhelmed.

If you have a bunch of pages like I do, you can organize them into the sub-navigation.

No CTAs

An acronym for “call-to-action,” CTAs encourage your website visitors to take action, which is the main goal of your website. What’s the end result that you want visitors to take? Buy your product? Book your service? Sure, you may have those pages linked in your navigation, but you want to make it super easy for people to buy by linking them in your CTAs.

Scatter links to your offer in your website copy, utilize buttons, and place promotional graphics in the sidebar of your blog. And always include a CTA at the bottom of your blog posts. (Check out mine below!)

Long paragraphs

Have you ever opened an email or visited a website and felt assaulted with a wall of text? It’s so overwhelming!

Shorter, concise paragraphs make information easier to digest.

And allow you to emphasize.

Inconsistent or outdated branding

Your brand is what differentiates you from other businesses and builds loyalty with your customers. Ensure your brand accurately represents your business and that the look of your site (colors, fonts, photos) and the sound of your site (copy) are inline with your brand.

Learn more about branding here. (See the CTA? ;))

Small or hard to read fonts

Your copy is important. It contains pertinent information and what convinces a website visitor to become a customer.

Your website likely has a few different text styles. On Squarespace we have Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and Normal text.

Your normal text is body text. It’s what you’re reading right now. Always use a clear, preferably sans serif, font for this as it’s the smallest form of text on your site. Set the normal/body text to no smaller than 12pt, depending on the font. And if your target audience is older, bump it up even larger.

If your brand includes script text, feel free to use it as Heading 1/Heading 2, just be sure the text is set large enough to be legible.

Broken links

Not only do broken links make you look unprofessional and disorganized, they can cost you sales. If your CTAs don’t go anywhere, how can you make money?

Check your page links at least once a month and after you update a page URL or add a new page. I recommend checking through links in blog posts every year.

Slow load times

Along with being confused, getting impatient is a top reason people click away from websites. Your photos and graphics don’t have to be print-sized files to display in good quality. On my website, I upload photos set to 72dpi with the longest length being 1,200 pixels.

If you worked with a professional photographer, ask for a separate folder of high and low resolution files. You’ll use the high for printing and the low for posting to social media and using on your website.

Note that sometimes you will need to use the larger file for banner images, which are the large, full-width images that appear at the top of some websites.

Social media as the forefront

The main goal of marketing is to get sales, and the vast majority of your sales happen on your website. So why would you push your website visitors to social media where they can get distracted and forget all about you?

Definitely link to your profiles, but place your social icons in the footer area of the site. And if you want to have a feed of your recent posts, place it closer to the bottom of your site. (Mine’s in my footer.) You want to give priority to your sales/service pages.

Ready to design or refine your website? Check out my online Marketing 101 course! There’s an entire module dedicated to website design, and it will take the confusion out of what you need to include on your website, as well as how to make it an effective 24/7 sales machine!

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