Soon, it seems, the generative AI bots will be making their own websites (replicating faster than humans will be able to keep up) and they will make them in a way that other AI bots will enjoy. At a party in the metaverse, one AI will make an offhand remark to another AI about a great website they just saw. They’ll share jokes and laugh and drink giga-juice. Until that ridiculous, apocalyptic moment happens, we think making websites that inform and delight real humans while driving real revenue still matters. To that end, we polled our website team to ask them about the most common mistakes they see in web design every day. Here were their candid responses:
Mistake #1: Overwhelming the User with Options
It’s tempting to think it’s best to let the user go wherever they want at any point, but if we take a step back and come to grips with the fact that we have the opportunity to guide our user down an ideal path, it’s much easier to focus, prioritize, and reduce. It’s all about finding the right balance between freedom and guidance.
Mistake #2: Uploading Massive Images
Full-screen videos and photos can take your website to the next level, but they can also knock you down a few. Large image uploads make websites slow. Google hates slow websites, and for SEO purposes we want Google to love us. Page speed is one of the many pieces that affect SEO, and for marketing, that’s a huge deal. Thankfully there are ways to compress and resize to keep your photos looking crisp without compromising the user’s experience. What’s worse than a laggy website that takes forever to load? Google says, “Nothing.”
Mistake #3: Designing for Mobile and Desktop
The days of only worrying about a 13″ Macbook screen and a 3.5″ iPhone screen are behind us. That’s right–we have dozens of screen sizes to consider. The iPhone itself comes in 3+ screen sizes, and that’s not even counting Android devices and tablets. Beyond that, people often use monitors of all shapes and aspect ratios, and many offices use 70″ TV screens to browse the internet. Luckily, we have graduated from spelling out a long list of font and image sizes for individual screen widths. With CSS, we have the tools (min/max widths, sloping size functions) that allow us to scale all of our web elements seamlessly across endless screen sizes.
Mistake #4: Not Hiring Fidelis.
This one speaks for itself. If you’re looking for a new or refreshed website, you know who to call!
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