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.
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.
Surprisingly, people will typically do what you ask of them; for example, if you end a blog post with "Let us know your thoughts. Leave a message in the comments below." you will notice higher engagement rates than if you had ended the blog post without a CTA. Simple CTA's show readers that you value their opinion-- you can also offer something of value to the reader at the end of the post (like a downloadable eBook). Everyone wants to feel that they received something of value for time spent. When you're crafting your CTA phrase be sure that it directly engages the reader, challenging them to take action. Remember, if your content reads like a sales email or is too boring, it's a major turn off.
If you steer clear of these 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.