It’s time for businesses to invest in more dynamic, interactive website development. If you’ve already done some browsing online, you may have found that a high percentage of the sites out there are a decade behind on some of the most basic tenets of good website design. Is your business’ website among them? Here are three of the most common ways businesses ruin their websites and drive customers away:
- Neglecting the Concerns of Mobile Users
By far the easiest way to ruin a website in 2015 is to ignore the needs of visitors who are on mobile devices. Mobile web design is absolutely mandatory now, and it’s not even that expensive or difficult to implement, thanks to the rise of responsive web design (which allows a site to recognize the device accessing it and reconfigure appropriately). If you’re really looking at mobile solutions, a combination of responsive design and mobile app design may be your best bet. But if you really want to annoy and potentially lose customers, go ahead and ignore mobile compatibility altogether.
- Writing for Search Engines Rather Than Humans
No one wants to read a sentence with “web design and development Los Angeles” crammed in the middle of it, much less a paragraph that has the same awkward phrase shoehorned in three or four times. Search engine optimization and keyword optimization are important when it comes to bringing customers to your website, but keyword stuffing will drive those same customers away as soon as they land on your site. (Just to let you know, thanks to ranking algorithm improvements in recent years, this type of SEO doesn’t even work anymore.) Bottom line: The only reason you should be keyword stuffing is if you’re dead set on losing customers before you even get them.
- Putting Looks Over Security and Substance
Internet users care quite a bit about data security — especially in light of highly publicized breaches that continue to pile up — so there’s no easier way to tell your customers that you don’t care about them than putting your entire development budget into pretty graphics rather than a solid and secure system. That’s especially true for e-commerce sites.
What does quality interactive website development or not-so-good design look like to you? Join the discussion in the comments.
