Almost every company you’ll come in contact with nowadays has a website, and unfortunately, many of them feature disastrous mistakes that impede their marketing efforts. Take a poorly designed website, for instance. What's your perception of the company? Are you likely to buy something from them? Probably not, I’d bet. Moz founder and marketing guru Rand Fishkin further describes how ugly websites can hurt a brand’s marketing power. On CEOs and bad-looking websites, he says: “Much like parents, it's often the case that a CEO or a CMO or VP of marketing or a business owner . . . they look at their website and they go, ‘Oh, it's so beautiful. It's amazing. It's just what I wanted. It's perfect.’ They can rationalize that even while looking at just a junky, horrifying piece of crap.” Bottom line: Don’t let senseless design mistakes destroy your brand’s reputation and marketing power. Here are 10 of the worst ones to make…and how to fix them:

1. Unattractive aesthetics

Speaking of bad-looking websites, sites with unattractive aesthetics are troublesome. While it’s a great principle to ‘never judge a book by its cover,’ it’s one that doesn’t apply much to web design. As ConversionXL points out, unattractive sites have poor conversion rates. Take the following site for instance:

2. Calls to action that aren't readable

Size does matter when it comes to your call to action (CTA). Make your CTAs as obvious as possible so visitors will click on that offer, subscribe button, or product page. Tiny CTAs get overlooked by most users, so guard against this by making your CTAs the biggest buttons on the page.

In this example, the main CTA is entirely too small and thus gets easily lost among the other elements on the page. If they're going for downloads, they’re unlikely to get them with a CTA like this. Marketers must keep in mind that most users are scanning web content, not reading, and therefore, can easily miss a call to action if it's not properly optimized. Which is why it’s important that marketers work closely with web designers to ensure that these elements really pop. Your CTA is the most important element of your web page, so the more people who see it, the more clicks and conversions you'll get. Follow this example:

The big, orange button is impossible to miss. And the drop shadow and rounded corners make it clear that it's clickable.

3. Calls to action that don’t look clickable “Clickability” refers to whether or not a web page element can be clicked, or looks like it can be clicked. This should be obvious to your visitors - they should never have to think twice about it. The user experience comes first and should take precedence over other aspects like personal taste. Sometimes that means designing for those who are novice internet users. Don’t just assume that all web users will recognize your subliminal messages. When CTAs don’t look clickable, obviously fewer people will click on them. So many websites have adopted techniques like drop shadows and gradients to ensure users don’t mistake their CTAs for other static web elements. Txtengine does this for its call to action button:

This example contains wayyy too much copy and is laid out in a way that's extremely difficult to interpret. Wireframe your site to better establish what the IA should be, so that your visitors understand what to do and in what order. Your design should be simplistic (but not over-similistic), clean, and intuitive. See Microsoft’s homepage for guidance:

6. Choice overload Choice overload leads to choice paralysis, aka when your site visitors can’t make a decision, so they don’t do anything at all. What this means is they don’t convert, otherwise known as your worst nightmare. Choice overload results from too many links on a page or even too many social share options. The following web page perfectly exemplifies this:

Let's look at Salesforce as an example. According to Alexa, the site’s average load time is 1.18 seconds and is faster than 66 percent of all sites. If you look into their bounce rate and average page views per visitor - two great indicators of engagement levels - you'll see pretty impressive numbers there, too.

Don’t let these disastrous web design mistakes drag down your conversions. Use this post as a checklist of mistakes to fix now and avoid later. Do your due diligence to ensure that your site’s visitors have the best possible experience with your site and its contents. Remember that even the simplest mistakes can kill conversions right off the bat. The key is recognizing when you’ve made one. What design mistake do you think is the worst of them all? Tell us what you think by clicking one of the social links below.

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