For a business to operate, in Dubai or elsewhere across the globe, it needs to have a powerful website presence. Your digital platform can make you or break you. 

You should never entrust an amateur website design and development agency with your website, no matter how simple you believe it to be. A poor website presence will reflect negatively on your business in ways that even word-of-mouth and good track record can’t fix. 

Luckily, you can look for an experienced web design company in Dubai to guide you and ensure the final digital product is UX-focused, SEO-optimized and thoroughly professional. 

So how to tell whether your website needs an urgent re-design? Here are 10 very basic website design mistakes you should avoid in order to win business and engage your audience. 

1. Slow Loading Speed

Such a simple thing to fix and yet so many websites instantly lose any visitors they might get because they take way too long to load. There are different reasons why your website might be slow – it can be due to unoptimized JavaScript, lack of CDN, excessive overhead, lack of CSS optimization, large files, caching issues, bulky code and more. 

Good news – your website development agency should be able to easily fix the issues and will know just which tools to use. Don’t wait for too long to fix this because until then, you will be using potential customers and your SEO ranking will suffer as a result… leading to you losing even more potential customers. 

2. Broken Links

We talked about these before. Having links on your website that aren’t functional and cause 404 errors will damage the user experience, make you look unprofessional and affect your SEO ranking.

Simply, it shows that you lack attention to detail which is not a good look for any serious business. 

Again, a good website design company should come to help and with a little help of the right tools check for crawl errors. Another wise thing to do is to have appealing 404 pages so that, in case of an unnoticed error, the user isn’t too inconvenienced and is easily directed back to the page. 

3. Responsiveness & Mobile Optimization Issues

You have to approach your website from your users’ perspective. A lot of them will be browsing from their phones, so logically, your website needs to look good on the phone. 

A lot of website design & development agencies, even those in Dubai, sometimes get a bit sloppy when it comes to ensuring responsiveness across all platforms. It’s not enough to just do the basics, the website needs to be developed so that it is intuitive and perfectly adjusted to each platform, especially mobile ones. Just so you know, Google’s search engine also penalizes websites that lack mobile optimization. 

Go through your website on your phone. Do you like the experience?

4. Confusing Navigation

A general rule is that every page should be just a few clicks away from the other. Avoid cluttered menus, too many buttons, repetitive pages and difficult-to-find content.

Your web development company should provide you with a coherent and logical sitemap and then design the website so that all the paths are intuitive and easy to follow. If you want your visitor to go to a specific page, a good web design should visually lead them to click on it. Make sure your contact info is always visible and accessible. Good search functions save time and win your audience over. These and many other tips are crucial for a joyful digital experience.

5. Poorly Written Content & Typos

Sadly, not all website design agencies care much about content, and if this is provided in house occasionally your own team might not deliver the right tone of voice or will fail at using engaging headlines and captivating descriptions. 

Even worse, if you have typos and poor spelling and grammar, your image will gravely suffer. Avoid obvious errors and go through the website copy. Some digital marketing agencies in Dubai produce a lot of copy for the sake of SEO, but they end up butchering the language which is not necessary to achieve the desired results. 

Our tip – get a professional copywriter!

6. Clutter and Lack of Formatting

There’s almost nothing more amateurish than a website so packed with content that it tires the eyes and confuses the visitor. Too many images, long, unformatted copy, cluttered menu… instead of saying a lot, it says nothing because the information gets lost in all the noise. 

You don’t need to show everything, prioritize. Give your images some white space. Use formatting, clear headlines and bullet points to make the text easier to get through. 

The best web design and development agencies have a team that understands content creation and will, in general, know how to display the existing content in an appealing, attractive way.

7. Lack of Calls-to-Action

Your visitors will enjoy your website if they instantly understand where to go and what to do. And this is great because you can guide them to act in the way that furthers your business objectives – buy the right products, engage and spend time browsing, build a relationship with your brand. 

When there are no call to action buttons or headlines, the visitors will be less motivated to act and the conversions will be low. It’s a very easy fix that you should look into. 

Poor use of calls-to-action or having too many is also damaging as it can confuse the visitor until they give up on the website.

8. No Connection to Your Brand Identity

A nice website will fail in creating brand recall if your website design and development agency failed to incorporate your brand identity into it. A great number of visitors leave websites without any memory of the brand connected to them. 

Make sure your digital agency understands your branding  and translates it well on the digital platforms. Here are some more tips about the importance of branding in website design. Hopefully, you work with a full-service branding agency in Dubai that will ensure your brand presence is strong and consistent throughout platforms. 

9. No Favicon

Favicon, also known as a website icon, tab/URL icon or bookmark icon is a simple small icon associated with your website. Your website designers would normally upload it on your website so that browsers make use of it (e.g. by displaying it in the browser’s address bar and next to the page name/title in the tabbed document interface, or as a desktop icon.) Ideally, your Favicon will be a simplified version of your logo or your logo icon. 

This is such a small element that does wonders for the professionalism of your website and its connection to your brand. 

10. Lack of Homepage Content

We are fans of clean and simple designs, but for the majority of brands, it is a big mistake to fail to provide informative content on your homepage. Not only will it hurt your SEO, but it will also confuse visitors unfamiliar with your brand and products.

We already talked about the importance of a great homepage on the first impression and conversion rates. Your homepage is what persuades the visitors to stay and browse, make sure it’s compelling and informative.

Conclusion

A lot of intricacies go into a truly stunning UX design, however one of the most important things you can do is avoid the basic mistakes. 

Go through your website and check for these simple errors. If you find even one, it is time to look for another web designcompany in Dubai. 

Reach out now and your business will see tremendous improvement!