 Welcome to the journey. Today we're gonna talk about 15 website design mistakes. And we're curious. Are you making any of these? All right, so there's 15 areas that we wanna dive into and where we see a lot of mistakes happening, starting with above the fold. This is your intro. What are customers going to see and what they should see when they land on your website right away. So we have an example. Thanks to our buddy Nealey. He created a site just for this episode, just for us. So Sam and I had stuff to pick at and also a visual example to share with y'all today. So first off, taking a look at the screen here, Emma's restaurant. No, you guys, I don't have a restaurant. How could I handle a restaurant plus coffee and kickflips? I mean, come on. She can do it, she's being modest. I'm only one woman. But here you see on the top of the website right away the title of the business, Emma's restaurant. I'd probably come up with something more creative for my restaurant than that. But Emma's restaurant. It's great because right at the top you have the about section services, et cetera, where you can go to. However, you do wanna make sure the name of your business is there, products and services. But one thing I'd recommend is having like a little guide on the side where all of this is, like the three bars. You can click on it and it cleans it up a little bit. I mean, that looks a little distracted. It's busy, exactly. It's a lot of different, for me, if I'm looking at this, it's a lot of different things that I can choose and I'm thinking, oh, which one should I choose? Yeah, and for example, there's a social media here but Facebook next to it. So why wouldn't that be done together? Yeah, so could have some work on the above the fold here. So number two, speed. You wanna make sure your website loads quickly and I did notice for this one, it did load rather quickly. Good job, Nelly. Shout out to Nelly for making sure that it loaded. So making sure it loads quickly on desktop, tablet, and mobile is important. All three. So number three, responsiveness. You wanna make sure that your website looks just as good on your desktop as it also does on your mobile device. Number four, intuitiveness. Is it obvious what the user should do once they land on your website? And in our case, it's not so clear. It's definitely not obvious because you land and you know you're at Emma's restaurant, there's a lot of different options at the top of where to go but in addition, there's this photo, which I do like the photo, but the text that actually prompts you to do something is not visible right away. You have to scroll down like this and not to mention the spelling error there but here it says get added to our newsletter. So that's clearly what the restaurant wants us to do. However, it's not so intuitive at first because it's not visible when you first get to the website. All right, so number five, navigational simplicity. Is it easy for people to navigate your site? Let's see. Well, where do you wanna go? Let's go to the about section. Yeah, let's learn about my restaurant because I don't know anything about it. It's new to me. And when I click about, what happens? Uh-oh, 404 page not found. So you wanna make sure that when you have places for people to go, you actually go to where you want them to go. Or maybe it works for story. I mean, maybe that's where the about section was supposed to be. Let's see. Neely, what's up? You're fired, page not found. Again, navigational issues on probably all of these. Number six, readability. Is the text on your website actually easy to read? And when you look at ours, well, I like the boldness of the, besides the spelling error, get added to our newsletter, but we need to scroll down a little further. All right, this section. Yeah, about, okay. The text kind of blends into the background, the white background. Yeah, it's gray on white. Exactly. I'm pretty hurting my vision, just reading my own website. You've taken the time to put this on here. You want people to actually understand what you're putting on there. So think about the colors when you have your audience in mind, are they gonna be able to see it? Yeah, the color of the font, as well as the background. Now thankfully, Neely didn't do this, but make sure that when you have a display font, it's easy to read. You don't want this fancy, scripty font. It's just gonna strain the eyes. So number seven, scanability. Is it gonna be easy for users to quickly scan your website and see what they need? Looking at this one, it's a little difficult. Yeah, people don't want to search for too long, search too hard to find what they're looking for. And in this case, there's just a lot going on and it's rather distracting. Number eight, cleanliness. Is your website copy clear and error-free? Now we've already been scrolling through for a little bit and you guys have probably noticed some of the spelling errors. If you know someone who's great at proofreading, kudos, hit them up, let them review your website, have multiple people do it. Cause right away, that's gonna give a pretty poor impression of Emma's restaurant. If I have these spelling errors, like we saw earlier up top here with our restaurant, restaurant spelled wrong. Who's gonna trust my food if I can't even smell a restaurant on my website? But also you can hire a copywriter. So that way you don't even have to worry about it. That's a professional. They can take care of all that. Yeah, a copywriter or a professional proofreader or both. So number nine, elegance. White space, also known as negative space. You want people to focus on the areas you want them to pay attention to. For instance, high end stores. Good example. They don't cram a whole lot into one space. They have white owls and they want you to focus on the merchandise that they want you to buy. Just maybe think of the last time I went to an antique store, which was the exact opposite of this. There's so much crammed into one space. It's very distracting. I often end up leaving with zero purchases. You don't want that to happen to your website. So in the same frame, you want your website to be very clear and able to have people focus on what you want them to see. Here, this website, we don't really have that. It's a lot of different colors. It's really busy and really making my eyes hurt. So use white space as a primary design element. Number 10, branding. So on your website, you should definitely have certain colors that you're using that are on-brand and then be consistent, as well as the font and the style. And then that's going to set the stage for the rest of your platforms as well, because this needs to be consistent. The website, oh yeah, and logo. Be consistent across your Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, et cetera. And on this site here, so far no logo. And I know we have one, so we need to fix that. And there's a variety of fonts. The colors, while it starts off with a very organic food vibe, spices. I love the coloring here. You don't scroll down too far, and we're getting into a whole other color scheme. And the bright red and the bright blue. Purple and tan. Oh my gosh, horrible purple with a weird mustard yellow. It's just all over the place. So number 11, contact info. So say for some reason you still want to eat at this restaurant. There's really no way for you to get in touch. There's no address. The links don't work. No phone number to tell them how horrible the website is. So you want to make sure your contact info is clear and easily discoverable on your website. All right, number 12, search. How well does your search bar work or feature on your website? As you can tell, and maybe this is for a reason, there is no search bar on this. So even if you did want to do a quick glance at the menu and you type in menu, there's no way to do that. So now there's no way to even Google or Googling. Yes, that is a verb. It is a verb. There's no way for it to occur on Emma's restaurant's website. So number 13, timeliness. Now as you'll notice at the bottom of this site, 25% off and it expires 2014. Way overdue. You want to make sure anything on your site like your menu, your contact info, or any other offers, you want that to be up to date. Number 14, annoyances. While this website has many things that annoy both of us, one thing it actually doesn't have and be mindful of this was yours. Popups, flash. Autoplay with videos. Yeah, think about, you know, we've all been in a coffee shop at some point. It's quiet, you're going to check on your website, maybe figure out where you're gonna get dinner tonight and then this video pops up and music is playing and someone's talking and everyone's looking at you and you're just trying to figure out how to close it. And then you end up leaving the website. You don't want this to happen to your customers. So be mindful of annoyances. All right, and finally number 15, error handling. Now we already know a lot of these links don't go anywhere. You oftentimes have options of having a 404 page or somewhere it says, hey, we don't have this page set up yet. Go back here so that you can actually go to where information actually is. Yeah, I just get a page not found. There's no 404 page error there. So you want to make sure you clear that up. And yeah, like Sam said, make it easy to get back to where you're supposed to be. But additionally, I should have links on all of these and take off consultations. Because what is that about? What are we going to consult my restaurant about? That's a wrap. You just learned 15 website design mistakes. Comment below, tell me which mistake on my site caught your interest and be sure to like this video and subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so you're notified when we have fresh content coming out. This is The Journey. See you next time.