Your website is critical to your branding and marketing efforts. Potential customers are visiting your website, and you want to ensure that you answer any questions they may have in order to sell your services or products.

Avoiding the following web design mistakes will help to make sure you are on the right path to growing your business, instead of losing it.

1. Outdated Content

When people go to your website, they want to see what is currently going on with your business. Topics such as new products or services you may have, as well as other information about your company. When the content is old, or stale, potential customers and clients will make negative assumptions, like you are no longer in business for example. To avoid this, make sure that you update your website’s content at least weekly. Fresh content will help you to avoid any negative assumptions from your audience and will help to keep visitors coming.

2. Doing It Yourself

While there is nothing wrong with trying your hand at web design, doing your businesses website yourself is a bad idea. Unless you are a web designer you shouldn’t build your website. Hire a professional web designer. It is a worthwhile investment. Your website is basically going to be the lifeblood of your brand and trying to take control and create it yourself could have negative consequences. Besides, first impressions only happen once.

3. Making Your Website Too Flashy

While designing your website, remember that marketing your brand is more important than having a flashy website. You want to do more than simply get people to come to your site. You want them to get to where they need to go, receive your marketing message and then take action based on your quality content, not flashy banners.

4. Prioritizing Urgency above Knowledge of Your Market

Too many businesses focus more on getting their websites up and running instead of focusing on researching and knowing their target audience. Knowing your audience, and designing your website around them, will return far better results than simply having your website published for the world to see.

5. Unclear Call to Action

What good does it do you or your company if people come to your website and have no idea what you want them to do next? When creating your content, make sure you include clear and easy to understand calls to action. Do this by letting them know what is in it for them, the customer.

6. Paying Too Much, or Too Little

The adage “You get what you pay for”, is just as true in the web design industry as it is in any other industry. If you pay bottom dollar for a web designer, don’t expect top-dollar results. On the other hand, you don’t need to pay huge amounts of money in order to have a professionally created website. Shop around and see what’s out there. With all the competition currently, you can get a quality website for your brand at very reasonable prices.

7. Attempting to Target Everybody

For this one, refer to #4 above. You have to know your market in order to get the most from your website. Trying to please, or target, everybody who might visit your site is impossible and will result in a very low conversion rate. Tailor your website so that it is the optimal experience for those that fit within your target audience.

There you have it. While it is not a guaranteed homerun for your website if you avoid the above mentioned web design mistakes, it will certainly benefit you and your brand in the long run if you do.