7 Website Design Flaws to Avoid

There are a lot of common mistakes e-commerce webmasters will make on their first website build. While we all must learn from the mistakes we make, chances are good that your visitors will not forget you’ve made them (by not returning).  When creating a site for your business, there are several website design flaws that you need to avoid if you hope to earn your visitors loyalty, and hopefully, some return visits.

1. Don’t Require Registration
While it is sensible to build a mailing list of perspective customers for future advertising, don’t require your visitors to register on your site to make a purchase. Forcing people to register before they even get the opportunity to see what they are buying is one of the leading reasons that website visitors don’t buy, and worse yet, never return to your site..

2. Don’t Forget Search Capabilities
A simple concept but one that is most-often forgotten. Including internal search capabilities is a great way to assist your visitors in quickly finding what they’re looking for. There are many popular sites that lack the search capabilities and for those visitors who have come to rely on the convenience of internal site search capability, not having one can hurt you.

3. Don’t Be Unclear on Payment Methods
When you are offering a product for sale, the buyers that come looking around your site will certainly want to know two things: how much and how can they pay for it. Many times, if a visitor can not clearly understand the rules of payment, they will leave the site and go look for the product on another site.  Visitors need to know right away how you accept payment, whether it’s by PayPal, credit card, checks, debit card or a combination of all of those methods, communicate it to them early in the sales process – don’t make them search too long to find out.

4. Don’t Make Contacting Customer Support Difficult
There are very few customers who will buy a product without first considering the type of customer service they’ll receive.  In fact, many large corporations have websites without a direct line of contact for their customers. How many sites can you think of that required a series of complicated steps in order to get a problem solved? Your prospective customer wants to see a clear-cut path to reach out to you should they have a problem.  Don’t require your customer to fill out a questionnaire to get a simple question answered. Just for the record, an FAQ page should not be the place where you send customers who have questions..

5.  Don’t Use Too Much Technology
While it’s eye-catching to incorporate a little bit of  Flash, Java Navigation and other technology, it is completely pointless if no one hangs around your site long enough to see it. Unless you’re show casing your Flash or rich media design portfolio, your visitors will only be annoyed by Java applets and Flash files that distract them from their intended purpose of visiting your site.  Most site visitors will want the site to load quickly and easily. No one wants to wait for a site bogged down with junk.

6. Don’t Disable The Right Click
Nobody wants to have their stuff stolen but essentially anyone can now copy what they want off of your site whether you disable the right click on the mouse or not. Since many of your visitors will be used to the freedom of the right click, it can be a turn off if you make a point of disabling the feature.

7. Don’t Overdo the Ads
Sure, you can earn money from the ads you incorporate into your website but too many ads placed all over the place is distracting and annoying. If you really want people to take your site seriously and see that you are in business to provide useful products and information, keep the ads relevant to your target audience and try to keep them to a minimum as well.

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