7 mistakes that web design clients make

Even our beautiful clients sometimes make mistakes. These are some of the most common, and what you can learn from them.

(We love you really).

7. Scrimping on photography

Which of these photos sells better:

Photos have been proven one of the most important parts of a website you can invest in, but are often ignored or cobbled together by the friend of an uncle who knows a guy who used a camera once. Decent photos can cost less than £1 each, and a professional photo shoot can pay for itself with a single sale.

6. Wanting a Flash intro, despite it being 2009

If someone asks us for one of these, we have a few things to say:

• Imagine if every time you used Google, you had to sit through a little animation before searching. How long would you expect Google to stay in business?
• If you went to a supermarket to buy something, and a mime stopped you at the door to do a 2 minute show on how to find your way round the store, would you (a) sit and watch, (b) push on past or (c) punch the mime out?
• Around 25% of your customers will leave your website just because of this. It’s the equivalent of putting a bear trap on your welcome mat. It will cost you money and cost you business.

Why not spend the cash on something more useful, like animation inside your website? The difference is people have chosen to watch that, and don’t feel imposed upon.

5. Thinking more is more

It’s very easy to keep adding to a design, under the assumption that you’re improving it. In reality, everything you add is diluting the success of what is already there. We’ve seen websites massively improve their conversion, simply by removing features from their site.

“I have written you a long letter because I did not have time to write a short one” – Blaise Pascal

This sounds easy. It’s not. Writing short copy takes longer. Simplifying can be – paradoxically – complex. Having the discipline to strip back everything to the minimum is often politically difficult. People will always assail you with requests to add more.

Take a look at your favourite websites and consider: how much text do they have on their homepage. Is their navigation long and complex? Is there white space on the page? How much restraint are they using?

4. Wanting your logo bigger

This is human nature. You see your logo differently from other people, because to you – it is you. You want people to notice it, like a proud label on a car. Everybody does this.

But to everyone else, your logo serves a purpose (“where am I, who are these guys?”) and that’s it. A huge logo actually looks tacky – rarely a quality you want to emphasise – and most importantly, it takes away valuable space from the rest of your design. Space for navigation, or content, or empty space which makes your design clearer.

Look at strong, quality brands (like Nike, Gucci, BMW) and see how effectively their logos are used. Just enough to work, and no more.

3. Underestimating copy, thy nemesis

80% of our website delays are caused by the client not preparing their copy in time.

Almost without exception, everybody underestimates the time required to generate new copy.

We’ve found on average an organisation takes around 1 day per webpage of copy they have to write. This doesn’t mean they take one day to write the copy – only that it takes this long to get round to it, research, proof it etc.  If you have over 100 pages of copy, this means 3 months.

You can produce copy much faster of course – but our experience shows if you don’t make a conscious effort to do so, that you’ll need around 1 day per page, on average. The best ways to write copy quicker are:

• Delegate draft copy to people in that area (e.g. departments).
• Get people to put a day (or more) in their diary to just work on copy and nothing else. Treat it like a meeting, and don’t allow distractions.
• Have one editor who puts it all together and makes it consistent. Ideally someone from a marketing background.

2. Assuming if you build it, they will come

We have a favourite question we like to ask new customers:

What are the top reasons people will find and use your site? Why will they continue to come back?

Ok, that’s two questions.

A frighteningly large number of website owners cannot answer. Or just as bad, their answers betray how poorly defined their strategy is, like “because they find us on Google”.

Great websites, on the other hand, have their strategy nailed from the beginning. An effective strategy might look something like this:

• Our customers have or are expecting babies
• We will offer useful and relevant content to this audience for free
• Our audience will be drawn into our free content via search engines, and social networking
• We will retain their loyalty via free newsletters and useful free tools
• We will integrate relevant products and services into our free content

This is the strategy of BabyCentre, the fantastically popular website owned by – and for the benefit of – Johnson and Johnson. Consider how well their website might have worked, if they had simply chosen to make a website about Johnson and Johnson, and expected people to come.

1. Not knowing what they want from their website

The most shocking and common of all mistakes, is simply not knowing what you want your website to accomplish.

Most people think they can answer this question, but they’ll find their website betrays their answer. If your website is really about generating leads for your sales team, why isn’t your phone number on every page? Why not use a different phone number on your website, so you can track if it’s working? Does this mean that your contact form is the most important page in your site? Is your contact form absolutely 100% grandmother proof? Could someone with dyslexia, or with a different first language easily make an enquiry? Do you test these things?

Great websites have a purity of purpose. Consider Firefox, who essentially just want you to do one thing: download Firefox. Everything is optimised around this, and it works brilliantly:

Does it work? A little over a billion times, at last count.

Defining exactly what you want – and don’t want – from your website is the single most important thing. If you don’t define what you’re after, you can’t even start to compete with those who do.

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With grateful inspiration from 7 common design mistakes that clients love.