10 Worst Mistakes to Avoid for Successful Web Design in 2019

by ​Sujain Thomas, Guest Contributor

As a continuation of the developments in web designing technologies in 2018, we will be seeing a major overhaul in terms of SEO-compliant web design in 2019 too. There are a lot of things the developers and designers need to consider to actualize a performing website for a business. However, a good website is not just in terms of its looks, but also the way how it functions and also how much user-friendly it is.

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There may be hundreds of articles you see on giving you instructions on how to make a commendable website in 2019, but in this article, we are looking at it at a different perspective of what to avoid to prepare one such website. Without knowing the don'ts, people tend to make a mistake unknowingly without even identifying what may be the reason for nonperformance.

The top web design mistakes to avoid in 2019

#1. Not telling the users what you do and why they may choose you
This is probably the gravest among the big mistakes made by the designers. When your page is loaded in front of the eyes of a user, the modern-day users tend to make an impression about the page in less than 3 seconds. You can prepare everything right, but on failing to help a user to make a justified decision about your site, they are going to hit the back button instantly. At the bare minimum, you should display your products or services clearly as well as some confidence-building content like testimonials, accreditations, awards, client lists or so.

#2. Not being mobile friendly
We had been discussing this largely in 2018 also, but still many websites fail to meet this need. Mobile friendliness is not a choice now, but a mandate for an existing website. About two-thirds of the internet users now access websites on their mobile devices, and if you are not competently getting displayed on their screens, you're screwed! You need to thoroughly audit your website for mobile friendliness and responsiveness in order not just to be user-friendly, but also to get SEO value.

#3. Your website takes a long time to load
As we have seen earlier, people don't wait for much to see your content. You may be seeing people are largely growing impatient and this is the same during their web endeavors too. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to loan, the back button gets a hit. Higher bounce rates are one major reason websites go down in search engine ranking. The ideal move for 2019 may be to get your website get loaded fully in less than two seconds.

#4. Not being reader-friendly
Have you experienced squinting yourself to read the content of a website? You know it isn’t ideal, but many tend to make this mistake while designing websites. One of the major flaws as per https://www.urbanseocenter.com/new-jersey-seo/ experts in case of web design is using some fonts which are too difficult to read. On standard web pages, the typical text size should be 14 points, and the best font type may be Sans Serif, which can perform well across the devices. Most importantly, you have to rework on your website if you find it is difficult to read your site on a mobile device.

#5. Maintaining a lot of links to open additional browser windows
This is yet another contributor to the bad user experience. A link to open a new browser window actually takes the user away from the site, but mostly there is no back button for them to come back to the previous page. The users now don't prefer to open multiple windows at a time, which makes it too difficult to navigate especially on mobile devices effectively. Keeping many windows also eat up more bandwidth, which may slow down the performance of the devices too.

#6. Social media icons on top of your website pages
This was trendy at one time, but now it is identified as a flaw. This is an invitation for the users to leave your site. Once if the land on social media, they may fall into the rabbit hole of scrolling and may not come back to the parent site ever. It is advisable to put the social media icons, but try to put theme effective below the middle portion if not at the bottom.

#7. The website hiding things
We may see that many things are hidden to get opened on tap at mobile screens, but this is not always a good option while displayed on desktops. Users prefer to get text links for better navigation rather than trying to comprehend the cues. By hiding the navigation menu, you are actually losing great opportunities to take your users further through the experience funnel or conversions.

#8. Small buttons
Sometimes when you try to click on a mobile site, you may have experienced the difficulties that the buttons you try to click are small, and you finally end up somewhere else. In fact, by default, buttons and links at websites are conventionally created as small mouse-clickable links, which are not actually meant for human fingers. However, when it comes to mobile browsing, these links may not be able to give the best user experience. This also needed to be audited and changed on your website.

#9. No H1 tags or H2 subheadings
When a typical website has a huge wall of text which cannot be skimmed instantly for specifically interesting content, not having proper header is a fine killer of user experience killer. Users may leave such websites quicker than you get room to request them to come back. Not just the users, but the search engines also want you to have heads and subheads. More than six billion searches are happening each day globally and one major factor for the search engines to get you ranked higher is by assessing the helpful markups for the bots to understand your page content. If search engine crawlers are not able to determine what your page content is, you may end up hidden somewhere in no-mans-land.

#10. No HTTPS security
Many tend to overlook the importance of having https on your URL. You remember a major data breach happened in Equifax last year? As we can see in many other cases too, data breach and hacking are not so uncommon nowadays, so the website should consider it as a priority. Not maintaining a secured website will waive a red flag to the users as well as the search engines trying to access your website. As most of the business sites need to deal with the personal information of their clients as well as financial information, it is mandatory to embed HTTPS security to your website to build trust.

When trying to hire a web design partner in 2019, always make sure that you sing up with some who has a proven track record and also have the upper hand in all the aspects discussed above.
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Author Bio: 

​Sujain Thomas is a data expert. She has been working with complex database architecture and big data analytics for almost eight years now. She has been helping many leading corporations optimize their customer service and product introductions as per big data analysis and predictive analysis.

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