Dallas Web Design Mistakes That Affect Your Digital Marketing Strategy
Far too many business owners overlook the design component of their website, and how it affects their digital marketing strategies. Your website should be aesthetically pleasing, but it should also be more than that. Research published in the Journal of Systems and Information Technology tells us that web design has a positive influence on online consumers’ perceptions and behaviors. This makes web design in Dallas, TX absolutely vital to get right.
5 Dallas Web Design Mistakes
You know how important digital marketing is to your business's short and long-term success. This entails more than paid ads on Google and social media marketing, though. Your website is also a big component of this. Let's take a look at some Dallas web design mistakes to avoid. If you recognize any of these in play on your website, you'll want to correct the situation right away.
#1 Slow-Loading Website
You may be thinking, "My website looks great and functions perfectly… once it actually loads." This is a huge mistake! Research shows that internet users have little patience for a slow-loading website when there are other options available to them. They will simply click out and go elsewhere. The speed of your website also affects your search engine rankings in Google.
When your website takes too long to load, your visitors leave. This increases your bounce rate and lowers your search engine rankings. This can be easily fixed by the right team. Experts in web design have a number of options available to them to correct the situation, including enabling browser caching, deactivating some plugins, and more.
#2 Poor Navigation
When people visit a website, any website, they typically do not find everything they are looking for on one page. These users must have navigational tools to move around on your site. The best-performing websites are those designed to help website viewers find answers to their questions, quickly and easily.
There are website analytics tools available that will tell a website team exactly how your website is performing, including where people are clicking and where you're losing them. This will be instrumental in streamlining your navigation.
#3 Not Being Mobile Friendly
Any business whose website is not accessible and easy to read with a mobile device is missing out on a massive chunk of the marketplace. Mobile internet has grown 504% in daily media consumption since 2011! More than half of all video streaming comes from a mobile device. If your website only looks nice and functions well on a large desktop screen, that simply isn't good enough. A website designed for mobile users will give your visitors a good customer experience, no matter what the size of their screen is. When people find your website and stay, this helps you rank higher on search engines. For this reason, being optimized for mobile devices helps boost your SEO.
#4 No Headings
All content is important, but not all content is the same. Headings are the titles that describe the content on a website. Search engines, like Google, use headers to locate your content and rank your website pages according to people’s search intent. There are a few different kinds of headers you'll want to incorporate. When a development team is building a website, these experts categorize headers into six different classes: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. In the industry, the H1 is considered the most important while the H6 is the least.
It is a serious design flaw for a website to show written content without headings. You'll want to make sure your website is coded this way and that the important keywords are in H1s or H2s at the very least.
#5 Putting Important Text in Images
Both images and content are important for a website, but they're not the same thing and shouldn't be treated as such. Images grab the attention of your readers, while text is for search engines and your audience. For search engines to read your images, you must optimize them by using alt text tools. Then search engines can identify your images and rank them accordingly.
If your important content is actually an image instead of written words that search engines can crawl, you're missing out on a lot of SEO value. Don't worry though; the right team can easily fix this.
Reach out to us for Web Design in Dallas, TX
If one, two, or even a few of these design mistakes apply to your website, it's time to reach out to The Old State. Our web development and design team can fix or totally redo your website in a way that looks fantastic, captures new visitors, informs your industry, and turns visitors into leads, and leads into customers.