There are many web development mistakes that we need to consider and they could prevent our website from stepping ahead of the competition. The most crucial mistake is probably not planning our website. Before we even develop our website, we should focus on specific ideas. We should know what our goals and plans are. It is necessary to sit down and draw a map of the general strategy of our online presence. We should incorporate site’s purpose in our plan. There are different purposes we can use, such as making people more aware of our messages. Our website should be built based on strong foundation and this will allow us to get a more solid website.
As an example, many webmasters fail to put clear contacts on plainly-seen locations. It is a simple and significant mistake that can be quite disastrous. People won’t contact us if people don’t see this information. As an example, we shouldn’t bother creating a dedicated Contact Us page. Complete contact information should be added directly on the footer. Our websites could also be riddled with broken links. No one would like it if they constantly find Page Not Found error in our website. For specific reasons, the webpage could be removed or its URL structure could change, causing some information to be inaccessible.
Website statistics should be examined at least once every month. This should be able to allow us to quickly detect broken and bad links. Information that is stale and outdated could also be a significant turn off for many people. If it’s already July and we are still discussing about last year’s holiday season products, then we may start to lose credibility. People could see that we don’t have updated information. For this reason, we should have a dedicated “What’s New” section and it must be updated frequently. Outdated information is surely a turn-off that we need to remove from our website.
One huge pet-peeve among consumers is the presence of too many colors and font styles. When people see more than four types of fonts on a webpage, they will start to complain about unorganized layout, although they don’t consciously spot these fonts. Using unmatched colors will poorly attract our eyes, while constant flashing can be quite annoying. This would be a sure-fire way to easily scare people away. A website should be designed with a kind of hierarchy like a tree with the home page as the main trunk. Main page is no longer the first place that people go when they visit our website. When people look for specific information, search engine results will show individual main pages.
This should be something where we need to properly pay attention tp. We shouldn’t allocate too much attention to main page and forget to add enough usability to ordinary webpages. As an example, eventually, there will be orphan pages in our website. An orphan page is inaccessible, because there are no links that go to them. This could happen because the URL structure may have changed due to some reasons. On some websites, URLs are generated dynamically because they use server-based codes.