Hello /r/entrepreneur. I run a website that helps entrepreneurs and other non-designers figure out graphic design. I look at amateur websites every day and I started noticing common mistakes that make your website look unprofessional.
So I decided to compile them into an article. I even added examples, many of which I sourced from this subreddit and /r/startups. Your landing page could be among these!
Click for the article with screenshots
Here are the 13 most common design issues to compare your web design against:
1. Boring Call to Action Button
Most of the landing pages don’t actually have a call to action, which if you really think about it, doesn’t make any sense at all. But those that do, sometimes make the call to action hard to find or unnoticeable. That's not good for conversions at all.
2. No “Logo – Website” Connection
Here’s the truth: especially as a brand new startup or blog, you don’t really need a logo. What you do need, however, is a consistent branding. Sadly, many entrepreneurs simply get a logo designed by their 13yo cousin and slap it onto a HTML template.
3. Inconsistency
This is where small details are extremely important. Use your brand’s colours wherever you are online. Use the same fonts, if possible. A common mistake is to ignore your branding guidelines.
4. Too Many Fonts
Amateur and beginner designers often like to go crazy with fonts. This is one of the biggest tells that the website wasn’t made by a professional designer. Stick to 1 or 2.
One more thing: if you’re working with a high-quality WordPress template, don’t play around with the fonts too much. Typically, well-designed, professional templates include great font combinations. Stick with them.
5. Random Colours
You can often see too many different colours on sloppily made landing pages. Sometimes, logos will have one colour shade, and the rest of the website a different shade. Come on!
6. Spacing Fails
Probably the hardest of all design principles to learn is spacing and mastering whitespace. Many bad website design candidates have copy and pictures just scattered all over the place — that makes them look dodgy and much harder to scan.
7. Cheesy Stock Photos
Business owners like to show images of people shaking hands and pointing at their presentations thinking that people will perceive their companies as more reliable. These photos are irrelevant and unspecific. Why not take some pictures with your iPhone and use those?
8. Default Photoshop Effects
Amateur designers like to overdo their designs by playing around with CSS3 and Photoshop effects. This results in making their page look like it was made in the 90’s. You don’t need to know all the fancy gradients, drop shadows, and other Photoshop tools. Focus on spacing, colour, and alignment instead and leave the cheesy Photoshop effects in the past.
9. Icons From Everywhere
Icons from different icon sets are in actually vastly different from one another — almost like different fonts. And you wouldn’t use different fonts in the same sentence, would you? (Correct answer is: No. You wouldn’t.)
10. Readability Issues
You can usually quickly assess the trustworthiness of a page is just by looking at its typography. In bad website design, you’ll normally see any (or all) of the following:
- too small or too big letters
- long lines of text
- large text blocks
- lack of hierarchy
- bad line-height
11. Navigation
Landing pages is a place to convert people into becoming your customers or joining your list. It’s not meant to direct people to other parts of the site. There should be just two options: buy or leave. Unnecessary buttons and links will confuse people and lower your conversion rates.
12. No Hierarchy
Lack of structure on your page can make it harder for your visitors to scan your content — and if they don’t get their answers fast, they will leave.
13. UX Issues
Say what you will about popups, they are very effective in grabbing the visitors’ emails.
However, there is one thing that I. Can’t. Stand. And that is scroll hijacking.
You know, when you try to focus on the website’s content, but instead of scrolling nicely like a normal website, it scrolls waaaay past what you were reading? It feels like a stupid trick, and you know what I will do? I will close the site.
Ok, this is the end of this list. Have you noticed any more I could add to this list?
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