Even beautifully designed websites can look unprofessional because of these common mistakes. It’s time to revisit your website and check if you’ve got a good website in your hands, or if it’s time to hit up an agency to make it great again.

Inconsistent colour scheme

Nothing screams unprofessionalism more than colour combinations that do not complement each other.

Are the colours on your website too bright for your users? Can users navigate to another page on your website without them wondering if it was built by a completely different digital agency?

Whether you are looking to create a new website or revamp your existing one, it helps to learn from some of these best practices for website design and colour schemes:

• Lots of white space
• No fancy colour transitions and shadows
• Not more than three colours within a page
• Avoiding text that is in bright yellow, green or anything painful to the eyes

Broken links

Have you deleted or renamed some pages on your website? If the answer to that is yes, then chances are that your visitors will stumble upon a broken link and see an error 404 message on that page.

Broken links (or dead links) refer to links on a website that no longer work.

The reason why they can still be found online is that these links have already been indexed by search engines.  Your original URL may have also been bookmarked by previous website visitors and shared within their social circles.

But not all hope is lost.

The best way to handle this situation is to redirect your website visitors to information that may be more relevant to what they are searching for.

• Redirect the page with the broken link to the revised post, or
• Offer your website visitors alternative links to similar topics of interest

Too many pop-ups

Many marketers swear by pop-ups and how an occasional prompting can increase one’s email signups and convert visitors to long-lasting customers.

Yes, pop-ups are effective, but not when they appear every time your visitors attempt to scroll down your webpage.

Including too many pop-ups in the user experience will distract visitors from your website and eventually annoy them to the point of exiting the page. Even if your web pages are ranking well on search engines, people who have had a poor browsing experience are likely to avoid clicking on your headlines – even if the meta description sounds promising.

Poor website content

First impressions count – and it’s not just the design of your website that matters.

Good website copy and blog content are tremendously important in getting people to perceive you as a professional business entity.

For starters, these are some key points on what not to do when writing general website content:

• Determine your preferred tone of voice

• Focus on what you can do to help your customers

• Stop rambling about yourself and your achievements

• Avoid excessive use of flowery language when describing your business

Many website owners tend to get carried away with describing themselves, their business, and their impressive stash of awards during their years of running the firm.

The harsh truth is that potential customers visiting your website do not care about you.

Customers care about what your business can do for them – and your website should have the relevant content that reflects that.

But do the same rules apply for blog content in your website?

To a large extent, yes.

You can switch up your tone of voice occasionally to give your readers some variety in what they read. Written blog posts should also focus on providing information that will be useful to your customers, and should not evolve into a sales pitch to get them to buy your products and services.

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