In today’s day and age, technology trends seem to come and go faster than weather patterns. What you thought was a cool feature on your website a year ago could be a faux pas at this point. Web design trends change, and certain functions or design aspects that were once considered state-of-the-art are now obsolete. If you want your website to perform optimally, consistent updates are a must. Below we have provided a quick list of web design faux pas that will quickly turn visitors away from your site, and that’s the last thing you want.

Design

Functionality

Keep it simple

This means don’t do the following things: overuse Flash, require registration and include broken links. These are all very basic pieces of advice that any web designer can easily do. If your website currently has any of these features present, either contact your current web designer and ask for a change, or look elsewhere for help.

Content

general advice

When choosing your domain name, don’t make it unnecessarily long or include any irrelevant words. This takes away from the legitimacy of your website and it can confuse users. We’d advise against purchasing domains with too many keywords as Google devalued exact match domain names as of September 2012 to prevent low quality sites from ranking well solely for their names.

Also, make sure to include links to your social media accounts on the site. And here’s the big one: don’t ignore search engine optimization. Reputable web design firms will be able to help you with this, and it will drastically boost the Google Page Ranks for your website.

We hope this blog post provided some food for thought. How many of these website faux pas have you encountered (or committed)?