How to Avoid Common Web Design Mistakes with Our Drag & Drop Builder
on 24 July 2023, by Bogdan, in Blog, WordPress, Cloud, Guides
by Bogdan
Web designers tend to innovate and adopt new web design trends to build unique and better-looking websites. However, some current design trends ignore fundamental web design and user experience standards. This leads to web design mistakes that make websites inefficient and ineffective.
In this post, we’ll cover common web design mistakes and how our drag-and-drop builder can help you to avoid them. We’ll walk you through:
- Why a well-designed website is important
- The common web design mistakes (that even experts make)
- How the Brizy drag and drop builder enables you to avoid these mistakes.
But before we get to that, let’s see why a well-designed website is important.
Why a well-designed website is important
Whether you’re using it personally or professionally, a website is often one of the earliest points of contact with your users. It helps you to provide valuable services to them. For these reasons, it plays a critical role in bringing in users and making sure that they stay and become valuable to you.
Which is why you must strive to design it well. A well-designed website has the following benefits:
- It helps to make a good first impression
A well-designed website will make a good first impression on new users. A recent study revealed that 94% of a website’s first impressions are related to its design. If you design your website well, it portrays credibility and professionalism which instills confidence in new users. This is especially important in ecommerce as it enables potential customers to trust your business.
- It facilitates retaining users
A well-designed website delivers a seamless user experience. It ensures that site visitors can easily navigate, find information, and interact with the website's features. A positive user experience leads to increased engagement, longer site visits, and improves the chances of conversions.
- Improved SEO
With a well-designed website, search engine bots will be able to easily crawl your site and rank it. Search engines, like Google, will rank it higher and this improves your chances of getting more organic traffic.
Overall, a well-designed website is important in creating a positive perception of your website, allowing users to work with you with ease. To be competitive in the current digital space, it is mandatory for you to have a well-designed site. Having said that, we can now look at common web design mistakes and how our drag & drop builder can help you to avoid them.
How to avoid common web design mistakes with our drag & drop builder
To create an effective and user-friendly website, you must be aware of the common mistakes that web designers make and avoid them. While making mistakes is a part of the design process, they shouldn’t make it to the final version of the website. Fortunately, with our drag & drop builder, you can ensure this doesn’t happen.
Apart from these, Brizy has specific features that will enable you to avoid these mistakes. We’ll look at the most common ones and how to avoid them with Brizy’s offerings.
Common web design mistakes and how Brizy will help you to avoid them
If you’re thinking about setting up a website for yourself or your business, here are the common web design mistakes to avoid – and how Brizy will enable you to avoid them.
1: Inconsistent layouts
Inconsistent layouts involve a lack of uniformity in design across different web pages and page sections of a website. For example:
- The navigation menu has different font types and colors on different pages.
- The spacing of headers and footers doesn’t match the rest of the pages.
- Images on one page are aligned centrally and left or right on other pages, and so on.
Inconsistent layouts create a disjointed and confusing user experience. Users might struggle to find essential elements and information because the patterns they expect will be disrupted. This makes it difficult to use your website – creating a poor experience that will lead users to click away from your site. It also massively reduces the chances that they will return.
You can avoid the problem of inconsistent layouts using Brizy’s templates.
Create consistent designs with Brizy’s templates
Brizy has 100+ pre-designed layouts that you can use to create uniformity throughout your web pages. These templates have been designed for different website niches including blogs, ecommerce websites, business websites, restaurant websites, and so on.
All you have to do is import a template and customize it by adding or removing elements, editing their appearance, and positioning them to suit your brand. With these templates, you’ll create a consistent browsing experience for users.
2: Uninspiring calls to action (CTAs)
A CTA helps you to guide site visitors to complete a conversion or desired action, for instance, buying a product or signing up for an email newsletter. Another huge mistake some web designers make is designing a weak CTA that doesn’t encourage users to take the desired action.
This may include burying the CTA in the middle of content where it is virtually invisible. Or creating a small CTA that goes unnoticed. We can find a good example of a weak CTA on the Crate&Barrel landing page.
It doesn’t stand out and users might struggle to find it. When site visitors can’t find the CTA easily, they will likely not take the desired action leading to low conversion rates.
We understand that creating a compelling CTA can be challenging, and with Brizy’s pre-made CTA blocks, we’ve got you covered.
Use Brizy’s pre-built blocks to create compelling CTAs
The Brizy drag & drop builder has up to 50 different CTA blocks which you can import and add to sections of your page. These have been thoughtfully designed to fit a variety of use cases. You can choose one that works for you and customize it using the element library and positioning controls provided in the Brizy builder.
That’s not all, each CTA block is available in both bright mode and dark mode to fit with the theme of your website.
NOTE: CTAs also rely on the messaging and you must word it in a way that creates urgency for it to be effective.
3: Too many elements
In an attempt to give customers as much information as possible on a web page, web designers end up including too many elements. In doing so, they forget to prioritize clarity leading to web pages with a cluttered design.
A cluttered design overwhelms users with too much information and elements. This makes it difficult for them to navigate your website and find what they’re looking for. The Good Reads website employs this type of design.
There is virtually no whitespace to work with which creates a poor experience for users.
In web design, sometimes less is more – you can apply this principle to avoid website clutter by implementing a minimalist design. Prioritize essential elements only and incorporate whitespace between elements so that they look cleaner and draw the attention of site visitors. You can achieve all of this using the Brizy builder.
Implement minimalist designs with Brizy
With the Brizy builder, you have the freedom to add and delete elements as you please. Using the sizing controls, you can determine the width and size of elements.
You can also use margin and padding to create whitespaces between and within elements to eliminate clutter.
4: Unresponsive design
Websites are typically designed on desktop screens. While designers work hard to make them look good on a desktop screen, they may forget to optimize them for mobile screens. This means that the website’s design won’t adapt to different screen sizes. When mobile phone users access it they might see misplaced elements, elements that are too big to fit on the screen, etc., creating an overall poor user journey for them.
Source: Apptegy
Given that more than 60% of web traffic comes from mobile phones, this can severy impact your site’s conversion rate.
Some designers opt to create different versions of their websites for different screen sizes to counter the problem of unresponsive design. However, this is extremely expensive to maintain.
The best solution would be to build mobile responsive websites from the beginning, and you can do it with Brizy.
Create mobile-friendly websites with Brizy
Whether you choose to build your website from scratch or use its templates, Brizy enables you to create responsive websites from the get-go. All of the layouts and blocks in Brizy have been mobile-optimized and their display will automatically adjust according to the screen size.
When building or editing your pages, Brizy gives you the option to use relative sizing units such as em and rem. These units help to create flexible and scalable layouts that seamlessly adapt to screen sizes. Also, you will be able to preview how your site will look on mobile devices before publishing it.
5: Links to contact pages
Having links to contact pages on your home page (or any other page) is not necessarily a bad thing. You will get to direct users to where they can request assistance when they have issues. However, including just the links means that they have to take an extra step to reach out to you, which could derail their experience.
The best thing to do here would be to include a contact form instead of the links to your contact page. This way, users can simply post their queries without needing to go to your contact pages.
Include your contact form anywhere with Brizy
The Brizy Builder has a form element inside the element library which you can add to any page of your website. All you have to do is click on it, drag, and drop it where you want your contact form to be displayed. This form is completely customizable and you can edit it in the following ways:
Customizing its appearance, for instance changing the background color, typography, etc.
- Styling individual elements like the fields and buttons.
- Editing the placeholder text.
- Defining the ‘required’ fields.
With this feature, you can display your contact fields on any page and allow customers to reach out to you in fewer steps.
6: Ignoring the Error 404 page
When site visitors come across the Error404 page, it means that the page they’ve requested is not available. When designers ignore this page, it may lead to the end of users’ journeys on the website leading to increased bounce rates. By simply reporting an error, this page remains unhelpful to users.
Customizing the Error404 page can do a lot of good for your website. You can make this page useful by adding elements that lead users back to relevant content on your site, helping them to find what they’re looking for. This might include providing a search bar, popular links, or suggestions to navigate to other relevant pages on the website.
Create custom Error404 pages with Brizy
Brizy has templates for different types of pages including normal pages, posts, product pages, and the 404 page. With the 404 template, you can create a 404 page and apply it across your website. It allows you to create your own error text, add images and other elements, etc. Depending on the type of website this doesn’t have to be necessarily serious – you can have some fun with it to engage users.
If someone gets lost on your website, you can make this page a little more useful by adding a search element or buttons to lead them back to the main content.
7: Language accessibility
If you want your site to open doors for you globally then having it in only one language is a mistake. A multilingual website enables you to break the language barrier to reach out to customers or audiences in different parts of the world.
If you run a business website, this will help you to explore new markets and expand your customer base. When your website is in the language of your target customers, it resonates with them on a deeper level, building trust and credibility. This, in turn, boosts the likelihood of converting visitors into loyal customers.
Create a multilingual website with Brizy Cloud
Brizy Cloud has a website translation feature that you can use to create a bilingual or multilingual website. All you’ll have to do is set up the languages that you’ll use, do the translation, and finally add a language switcher on your website’s header.
When users visit your website, they’ll be able to translate your website into their preferred language by clicking on the language switcher. As a result, you can offer curated experiences for users across different parts of the world. Everything you need to know about this is in our Translate Your Website into Multiple Languages guide. Visit this post and learn all about how you can turn your Brizy Cloud website into a multilingual site.
Conclusion
Making mistakes during web design is not necessarily a bad thing. But the mistakes you make become damaging if they appear in the version of your website that goes online. In this guide, we’ve highlighted some of the common web design mistakes. We’ve also shown how the Brizy drag & drop builder sufficiently equips you to easily avoid these mistakes and build polished and visually appealing websites in just a few clicks.
Article by Bogdan
Co-founder & Head of Design, Bogdan has a passion for everything that works great and looks awesome. Guilty for most of the UI and UX around this place, you can say "Hi" to him at bogdan at brizy dot io
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