Common web site design mistakes you need to know about

Any time you or your business hires professional services, it really pays to know how to judge what you’re paying for. Price along is not a sufficient guide to quality. Nor are testimonials, examples or proposals. To get a true feel for who the best candidate for the job might be, it’s worth looking at all these things together.

But it’s also immensely helpful if you do a bit of research. We’re not saying you should prepare a thesis on the subject. Just learn enough to know how to judge those examples and testimonials – and how to put different prices in context properly.

In the case of web design services – something pretty much every business these days has had (or is going to have) to negotiate – there’s a vast number of measures by which to judge the quality and value of prospective providers. The more you know, the better you’re able to judge. Here are two important mistakes web designers commonly make that you should be aware of.

Inconsistency is the mother of all bad web design. If a website looks one way or does one thing on the homepage, then looks or does another in other pages, visitors are quickly going to become confused and unconvinced of your quality or trustworthiness. Design elements, layouts, links, forms – everything has to be stylistically and functionally consistent throughout. Your website’s interface should be clean, logical, user-friendly and above all consistent.

You will have heard the saying “less is more”. Right now, in web design, less really is more. More attractive, more engaging, more likely to make a visitor feel like they want to know more about your business and browser further into your website. If a designer shows you examples of sites they’ve done and those sites are cluttered with copious amounts of badly formatted copy and awkwardly placed images, steer clear. You want to present only the most essential, useful information to visitors. The more you clutter a crowd a website, the less you’re able to clearly communicate the important stuff.

When you’re in the middle of choosing which web site design services are going to best suit your business’s budget and requirements, look out for these two things. Go for consistent over confusing, and keep away from clutter in favour of simple, clean design and layout. Anybody who tries to sell you sites that look too busy and don’t function consistently isn’t worth your time or money.