5 Web Design Hard Truths and How To Overcome Them In 2022

Facing the truth can be hard, sometimes it’s a truth you don’t want to accept but in the end it will be good to know. And in this blog, we are going to throw some pretty hard truths about your website at you.

It might not be nice, but it will help you in the end.

Not only that, but we are going to help you overcome these issues with your website. We aren’t completely morally void.

1. It’s not all about you

When writing the content for your website, you think about it in this silo of your business. You want to put down what you want to say as a business.

You lay out all of your services so you can show the users all the things you can do and you have an about page that has some story of when you were founded and by who and that you have a lot of expertise.

The thing is, they don’t really care about that. Whilst it’s true they are looking for a service like yours, there are likely to be 100 other companies that offer the exact same services. How you were founded doesn’t really matter either.

So instead of just talking about what you do, put yourself in their shoes. What would you want to know if you were looking for that particular service? Generally they want to know it will solve their problems and challenges.

This is where you need to start taking your website, the client is the hero of this story, you are just the guide. So you need to make your website’s story about them, talk directly to them and offer guidance on how they can get to their end goal.

2. Your messaging is wrong

This ties in with the truth above, but is talking about the specific messaging you use across your website.

Imagine your business as an actual person at a networking event. Now if you were to meet that person and they just started reeling off everything they do and just were talking about themselves, you wouldn’t keep talking to them for long. It’s not that interesting to you.

Instead, if that person talked about the ways they can help you solve a challenge you’re having and how they have done that for others. You’d be interested, because there is something in it for you.

A great formula to create titles that speak in this way is:

{What you offer} so you can {challenge you solve}

An example of this would be:

Building high-performing websites so you can convert more customers

As you can see, the offer is the ‘sales pitch’ of your service, so if someone asked you to pitch what you do in 3 or 4 words, this is what that would be. The challenge is a problem the customer is facing right now and you spin that to the future state when they work with you. We solve the challenge of client websites not getting as many sales, so the future state of a client working with us is ‘converting more customers’.

3. You don’t have a strategy

When you start thinking about building a new website, most companies fall into the trap of ‘this is what we had, so it just needs to look nicer’.

That’s a bad way to think about your website, after all, it’s your 24/7 salesperson and generally one of the first points of contact with a new client. It needs to be on top form.

When you are going to build a new site, or even if you are thinking of updating your current website, you need to have a strategy in place. This doesn’t need to be 1000 pages long, in fact, it can be less than a page. Here’s what you need in it:

A goal

Set a goal of what you want people to do on this site and what you will get out of that. Is it filling in a contact form, buying a particular product or reading a blog?

A persona

Next, you need to set out the persona or personas that will be coming to this website and what each of them is looking for. You should have a full persona sheet ready for your marketing, so you can use this.

How that user gets to the goal

Finally, how do you get user A from coming to your website to completing the goal? And how do you guide them towards that?

Remember with these strategies and goals, it isn’t always about converting them on the first visit. Give them a reason to keep coming back for more and gradually influencing them further down the road towards the goal.

4. You’re doing SEO wrong

This is a big one. We see so many companies doing their SEO incorrectly, and we get it, SEO is a tough and ever-changing landscape. Basically, it’s hard work to actually keep up with it, like this blog will probably be out of date by the time it’s posted hard to keep up with.

What we often see are basic homepages and service pages that haven’t been updated since the website launch, no blogs, no other continuous updates to the site. Again, we get it, it takes a lot of time that you might not have, but is an essential part of marketing your business these days and can’t be ignored.

We also see websites completely missing meta titles and descriptions! It’s not quite as often, but it happens more than you’d think. Again, another essential piece of information missing.

Now we could go into content hubs, blogging, Href and all of the pros and cons there, but that would end up more like an epic novel than a blog.

So for now, what you need to do is continuously look at your website analytics at the very least on Google Analytics and Google Search Console, then make a plan to keep updating your website. See what is missing, listen to what your clients are asking and create content and pages around those questions.

Ultimately, if you can answer more questions than your competitors you have a great start in the world of SEO.

5. It’s not scannable

The content problems keep adding up and one of the problems we see with a lot of client sites are walls of text.

This is a problem because at the best of times, people don’t want to read what’s on your website, and at the worst, they will just leave without reading anything. In the fast-paced world we live in we need the information to be easy to find and quick to read.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a lot of information on your website, it just means it needs to be laid out and written in a way that makes it easy to scan.

• Start thinking about separating text into smaller and more manageable paragraphs.
• Cut text up and put it into bullet points for an easier read.
• Use titles to split sections up
• Bold, italicise and underline important parts

By doing this you are going to help make your content so much easier to scan for people, making them more likely to take further action on your site, and who knows, maybe even read it!