MAINTAINING YOUR WEBSITE DESIGN
5 Mistakes that Will Destroy Your New Website
Maintaining your website design: it’s necessary just like maintaining a home. You know that feeling you get when you complete a task (like organizing your pantry) successfully and you take a step back to look at the finished product? Ah yes, it’s so satisfying. That’s how we feel when we step back and reveal our latest Fort Collins web design projects to our clients. It’s sort of like we’re doing a dramatic home reveal as seen on HGTV: converting a domain that feels out-of-style and dated and transforming it into a clean, stunning, and welcoming design.
Speaking of HGTV, do you ever wonder what happens with these stunning home renovations, especially if the families living there aren’t necessarily interior design experts themselves? We have a good guess as to what could happen. The fact is, we’ve seen what can happen with our finished beautiful design projects over a period of time.
Most of our websites are created so that our clients have the power to make content changes as necessary and add new content. We want them to feel like they have control over their site so that they aren’t forced to contact us for every new update. However, sometimes over a period of time, changes that may not even seem super significant can begin to erode that original, beautiful design and function.
In this article, we want to lend you our design eye and tips to help you in maintaining your website design and keeping it functional. When making updates to your site, avoid these mistakes:
1. Cluttering a Page with an Abundance of New Content
One of our goals in designing a new website is to create pages that feel clean and organized, helping visitors to easily find what they’re looking for on your site. From everything to image placement, content length and organization, paragraph breaks, and headlines, we’re thinking about presenting a visually appealing design while effectively communicating your vision.
Naturally, there will be changes that happen within your business and you may need to update website content accordingly. However, sometimes the order and clean feel of your website can be lost when new content is added without keeping design in mind. As much as you may want to add those 3 new images you found, throw in a few more links and graphics in the sidebar, or upload a few more paragraphs of content, consider the design of the page first. If your content was originally written to fit into a certain content block on the page, adding more may cram up the space, stretch the design, and make things feel disproportioned or cluttered.
Example of how content could ruin design:
Notice in the image below how the two paragraphs of content are basically the same length. Especially because we designed them to show up side by side, adding a few more sentences to just one side would ruin the design effect.
Here’s an example of what the page would look like if I decided only my second paragraph needed to have some more content. See how that creates all this new awkward white space on the left?
2. Uploading Poor-Quality Images
We can hardly emphasize enough how much the photography on a site affects the design. Even when you have a page that is designed well, you could ruin it visually with one blunder: adding a poor quality image. Do you have to be a professional photographer to have a beautiful website? Not necessarily. However, as you choose or take pictures for your website, consider the following tips:
- Use high-resolution images.
- Make sure you have good lighting.
- Stock images can be a great option, but try to avoid images that look really posed or fake.
- Upload images that are the right size. Images that are too large or too small will quickly ruin the design.
- Keep product images consistent, using the same backgrounds as much as possible. Displaying product with an excessively busy background will distract eyes from the intended focus.
- Try to keep staff images consistent. Throwing in a new employee’s selfie amidst high-quality staff portraits will instantly do design damage.
3. Uploading Visual Content that Doesn’t Align with Your Brand
Part of maintaining your website design includes not veering away from your brand. If we’ve built your site, we’ve probably just spent large amounts of time implementing a cohesive brand across your website and beyond. Remember that your brand is far more than just a logo. It has to do with the overall feel and message that comes across to your customers throughout your website and your business as a whole. We’ve spent time choosing the right colors to use consistently, the perfect fonts, images that accurately reflect your business, etc. No matter what page someone visits on your website, it should feel like your business.
One of the mistakes we’ve seen people make is uploading visual content that does not seem to align with their brand. Whether they’re uploading images that have completely different color tones than other images on their site or give an inaccurate visual of their company, they can easily confuse visitors about their brand message.
4. Duplicating Content
We probably all learned about plagiarism early on in school. Surprisingly, many people still try using content for their websites that they’ve found elsewhere online. This includes anything from using someone else’s written content as your own or even posting images to your website that don’t belong to you (and without proper image credits).
Don’t think you can pull the wool over Google’s eyes. Google is great at recognizing duplicate content and can penalize your website for it. Your website may not literally be wiped off the internet and duplicate content might not even hurt your website’s visual design. However, your rankings could seriously suffer so that people cannot find you in search results. You don’t want to destroy the ultimate goal and function of your site: bringing potential customer traffic and ultimately sales conversions. Original content is worth it and far more professional.
Remember, too, that Google does not have the perfect insight into whether or not you originally wrote something. Even if you are not using someone else’s content, copying and pasting your own content from another site you own or use is still going to be viewed as duplicate content. As a best practice, write new content for each page. Never copy and paste from one place to another.
5. Creating Blog Posts with Only Images, No Content
We know, keeping up with a blog can be overwhelming. You probably have plenty to do outside of writing a new blog post every so often.
Perhaps you just had a new infographic created featuring a service or product. Merely popping it into a blog and publishing seems like an easy solution, right? After all, infographics are a great way to communicate information. However, Google can’t really help you rank that page without written content.
Unfortunately, Google can’t read the content on your image to tell what your page is all about or to provide your page as a valuable search result option for a specific search term. If you’re going to upload an infographic or any type of image to a blog, make sure you do Google (and yourself) a favor and include relevant written content along with your image. Even including a paragraph or two is better than nothing.
Another Bonus Website Maintenance Tip: Take Consistent Backups of Your Website
Let’s face it. We’re not all website design experts. Without that experience behind our belts, it can be easy to destroy design unintentionally. That’s why we encourage people to make sure they take a backup of their site before they make any changes. If for any reason there is damage to the function or design of your website after updates are made, you can restore the website to the most recent backup version.
Getting Back to a Well-designed Website
How are you doing in maintaining your website design? Has your site lost some of its design appeal and function after a few changes? Are you looking for more help beyond this article to give your website a design refresher? We would be happy to help. Call us at 970-674-0079.