The presentation of a website's homepage is the first thing a visitor sees, so if it is confusing, or aesthetically unappealing, it may be the last thing they see on your site.

A website should be clean, easy to navigate and read, prompting visitors to click through content and return for more. There are certainly many nuances to creating an effective and attractive site, and avoiding these web design mistakes will definitely help you along the way.

Unclear, Boring, Static Content

The purpose of your site should be clear to a visitor within seconds of arriving. If your homepage is misleading or too obtuse, visitors will navigate away to find another site that better fits their needs. Clean, simple homepage text, located in a central area on the page, will tell visitors what they need to know and how to use the site.

Producing new content is important for SEO and it helps drive traffic, but be sure your content is always relevant to your site; otherwise, you will muddle the purpose of your site, and you may lose traffic, or attract unqualified leads.

Popups and Advertising

You probably recognize this from personal experience: Advertising can irritate visitors quickly, while degrading the professional appearance of your site. Also, depending on whom you use for ads, you could end up with competitor ads placed on your site, and the extra money is not worth losing customers because of annoyance.

Pop-ups are maddening, excessive attempts to force visitors to juggle multiple windows and pages rather than simply hitting the back button to return to where they were. Many people keep the pop up blocker feature turned on in their browsers, meaning that they either have to approve each pop up from a site, or they miss content. Plus, many people tend to associate advertisements and dangerous spam with pop ups. Avoid using them at all costs.

Frequent Spelling and Grammar Errors

This is obvious: you should proofread everything before you post it to your site. That means keeping a vigilant eye out for spelling, grammatical, or any punctuation errors.

Cluttered Graphic Design

Disorderly design diminished the impact of your content and could very well annoy visitors enough that they navigate away from your site. The cleaner your website is, the easier for a visitor to understand its purpose and navigate the site. Plus, if the page contains too many gigabytes of design content, it will take longer to load and, as a result, may not work at all for people with slow internet connections or who are visiting via their phones or tablets.

Text Eyesores

Avoid these at all costs: fancy fonts, excessive use of bold and underlined text, and poor color choices. While it may seem simple to use a traditional dark color font on a light background, it works. It is important to keep this in mind: many of the visitors to your site have already spent some time staring at their screen, so you do not want to give them a headache with a pastiche of garish colors.

ImageWorks, LLC

If you steer clear of these ct web design disasters, you will be able to create a fresh, user-friendly experience for your visitors. Using terse, readable content will give visitors an incentive to come back.

If you partner with a company like ImageWorks LLC that specializes in both responsive web design and inbound marketing, you can merge your design and marketing goals together to create an appealing website that effectively draws in website traffic, converts leads into customers, and makes it easy for users to find what they are looking for and communicate with your company.