A well business website design that is built and marketed professionally is sure to bring in many leads and sales. If done badly, your website may receive little to zero traffic and nobody will see it. Below we discuss the biggest design mistakes you must avoid when having your website built.

1. Use relevent title tags. When a website is built, you should use meta title tags to describe what is on each website page. Whatever you have in the title tags also appears in the blue bar at the top of the window. Be sure to include some of the your target keywords in the title tag to help people when they are searching online.

2. Filling your webpages with Ads. Don’t squeeze lots of ads and banners on your pages. Doing this will not only distract potential buyers, but also make them click the back button quickly and leave your site asap. If you do use ads, keep them to a minimum.

3. Don’t use complicated website navigation. Most websites put the buttons on the right, left or top of the page. Main navigation pages such as the contact us, about us, faq, home page, etc. are normally best on either the left or top of the page. Don’t try and impress visitors with whizzing-out menus. Keep it simple and your customers will stay on your site longer.

4. Dead links on webpages. When a visitor clicks on a “dead link”, they get an error message and get very frustrated. Make sure all the links on your website work correctly – and that they point to the right place. Remember that having dead links on your pages can also get you penalised in the earch engines.

5. Don’t use Macromedia Flash on your pages unless impossible. Flash does have a place on websites, but is mainly found in gaming or interactive sites where this cannot be done a different way. Consider using animated GIF’s for moving images instead, as most people can view these in a web browser. Another consideration is you could try using javascript or java which is more supported that flash. Flash can take too long and by the time it has, your visitor has left your website.

6. A lack of a search box on a website. Large websites have many webpages. Adding a search box facility allows these to be searched effectively and quickly.

7. Don’t use PDF documents on your website unless there is no other way. Using PDF files is only a benefit when perhaps uploading your company brochure online. It is much better to take the time to put the brochure in HTML format which all web browsers can read without a plug-in.

8. Visited web links don’t change colour. Make sure links already clicked by your visitor on the website change colour and show as visited. People surfing the web get used to a link changing colour once they have already clicked it so keep it familiar to them.

9. Messy text formatting. Break the website text up into nicely formatted paragraphs, seperated and spiced up with the occasional picture. Too much text blocked together makes visitors “switch off” and close a website if they see too much. Keep your site consistent and clear . Consider using bulleted lists, headings, highlighted words, quotes, and subtitles.

10. Don’t use small fonts. Using fonts that are easy to read can make reading your website much easier for visitors. Remember that not all site visitors might have good vision. Also You should also consider making your site W3C compliant so that blind people can also read the text with a “screen reader”. Don’t use images that contain text, as screen-reading software will not be able to “read” them.

Learn more about business website design. Stop by Digital Flair where you can find out all about how to make your business web design bring your company leads and sales.