Not only do I work with clients on Custom Website Designs and premium Squarespace Website Templates, I also offer Power Hour sessions which often feature a website review or audit. It’s often the perfect investment for an entrepreneur who has completely DIYed their site and looking for a little guidance when it comes to optimising it by hiring a designers eye for an hour.

It’s fair to say I’ve seen a LOT of websites over the years. You know, the good, the bad and the somewhat ugly. What’s amazing is often with a couple of tweaks you can transform a lacklustre site into something powerful and inspiring. In this blog, I’m going to run you through some of the most common mistakes I’ve spotted…

MISTAKE #1: Not including your mission statement

If you’re a regular around my corner of the internet, you’ll have seen me harp on about this time and time again. If you’re new, let me introduce you to arguably the most important aspect of your website design…

Your mission statement needs to be front and centre on your website. Why? Well, when a potential customer or client lands on your site, they need to know if it’s worth hanging around. To do this, we explain some crucial information about our business which tells them ‘yep, this is going to be for me’.

Without it, they aren’t going to know who you are or what you do. Basically, they’ll be confused. And when we’re confused, we probably aren’t going to go out of our way to find a solution to something like this.

Here’s what to include:

• Who you are

• What you do

• What makes you unique

• Who you work your magic for

And there, my friends, is a recipe for a perfect mission statement.

MISTAKE #2: Tiny Fonts

This is a trend I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while now.

One of the lessons I took from school was to always print of text in font size 12px. It’s ingrained in my brain.

But online, things don’t work exactly the same. Let me tell you, fonts at size 12px are hard to read (I’m looking at you Showit websites).

There’s nothing worse than spending hours working on your website copy - only for it to be too small to capture your visitors attention and it goes unread. You want to make sure it’s easy to read so it doesn’t go under the radar.

One change you can make on your website now to make it more easy to read and navigate is to up your paragraph font size to at least 16px. To give you an indication of the size of this, at the time of writing, my font is 17px. Some people in the web design industry even go for 18px as a minimum size.

MISTAKE #3: Writing way too much

Who? Me? Writing too much on my website? Nah!

Actually, I’m sorry to say this is perhaps the most common I see on websites.

Too much text will lead to confusion. Your visitors will feel like your brand is cluttered and they’ll be unsure of where to look. They didn’t sign up for sifting through endless paragraphs of texts. So they’ll probably click off your site and back to their Netflix binge. Not what we want!

The cold hard truth is only about 20% of your webpage will get read. They barely have time for their evening skincare routing let alone reading all your fluffy website copy.

So, what can we do?

I always recommend going back to what you’ve written a few days after the first draft. Then get your imaginary scissors out and get cutting that thing.

I mean it, seriously cutting that thing down. Cut it in half. Then go through what’s left and cut it again.

You might like: 5 Steps to Client Winning Content

MISTAKE #4: Too many navigation links

Now let’s take the theory from the last point and take a look at your menu or navigation.

We still want to keep everything as simple, easy and streamlined for your visitors.

Trust me, I know how easy it can be to get carried away with adding pages to your navigation. It happens to the best of us! But this can cause yet more confusion for your audience.

“Where do I click? There’s 12 items in the navigation and they all look good. Hmm maybe this one… or this one? I’ll leave it and come back later when I have more time and energy to do this.”

Guess what? They probably don’t come back later.

It’s all about considering what’s really important. What pages are must have destinations for your visitors?

Pick a maximum of 6 main links in your main navigation.

Then if you want you can link other pages in a dropdown folder, in your footer or even as links on your main pages. This will take your potential customers and clients on a journey through your website.

You might like: The 7 Pages I Recommend for Your Small Business

MISTAKE #5: Using poor quality photos

A picture can tell a thousand words. We just need to make sure it’s lovely, positive and on brand words it’s saying!

The bottom line is that poor quality images indicate poor quality products or services. Not the kind of impression we want to make on our sites, right?

Things to look out for:

• Blurred photos

• Stretched photos

• Stock photos that don’t tell your story

You might like: How to Pick Photos for Your Brand and Website

Bonus MISTAKE: Not using (enough) testimonials

These are like GOLD on your website. I’m serious.

Testimonials should form the bread and butter of each of your website pages. Sprinkle them through your site. And then sprinkle some more.

Trust is such an important cornerstone to successfully converting your site visitors into customers and clients. Visitors are so much more likely to make that purchase if there’s proof in the form of testimonials and case studies which shows other people have loved your work.

I’ve yet to find a website that has too many testimonials.

In fact, I’m off to add some more onto my site.

You might like: How to Create a Testimonial Slider in Squarespace

I hope you’ve learnt something from this list of mistakes to avoid on your website design. Which are you off to fix first? Let me know in the comment below!