How do you stay on top in the web world? The textbook approach to this question is, attend web design conferences. You’ll get well acquainted with all the new trends and tools. You may even build up new skills that you can apply to your work.
We have come up with a list of five blunders that must be avoided to stay relevant in the web design game.
1. A Flash intro without a skip option
You must always empower your users with the ability to skip any content they don’t want to watch, like flash intros or advertisements.
At present, the average attention span of humans has dropped down to just 8 seconds from 12 seconds in 2000. If you prevent your audience from accessing what they want to see in the first eight seconds, you will lose them forever. Give them all the options they would ever want to keep them happy and satisfied.
2. Your Entire Website Is In Flash
Making your whole site in flash it not acceptable. You must incorporate some content in HTML format as well. If you don’t follow this, IOS users will not be able to access your website. As the mobile market now is immense and can’t be ignored, you will lose out on a significant share of the audience that can access your website if you make an all-flash website.
3. Your Site Isn’t Mobile-friendly
When you start building a website, start with mobile, and then scale up to larger formats up until you get to 40 inches. Doing this will ensure that your site is compatable and scaled to every device possible. Mobile optimization is an essential norm for websites at present.
According to the research conducted by The Pew Research Center, about 56% of adults use cell phones. Shopping has become one of the primary uses of cellphones today. They even found that around 17% of all mobile phone owners use their phone as the primary browsing device. With such stats, you can’t afford to ignore optimizing your site for mobile devices.
4. Subscription forms without confirmation
Subscriptions forms are what connect you with your visitors even when they are not visiting your site. Keep it user-friendly and straightforward. If you want to know what is it that your audience expects to receive, you can ask them after they have submitted their contact details. As and when someone subscribes to your newsletter, send them confirmation message.
5. No Contact Information
This is a major issue, and fortunately, it’s not very common. However, some sites still do exist. They may just have a link to their Google Maps location or Yelp. Make sure that your visitors don’t have to leave your site in order to find your contact information. Even though some sites may have their contact information, it may be hard to find, which will result in the same problem. The solution to this issue is to have your contact information in the bottom corner of every page of your site.