5 serious mistakes that web developers often make_html/css_WEB-ITnose

Whether you are a programming expert or a technology enthusiast, you will inevitably make various mistakes during web development.

If you make a mistake, you can correct it. But if certain mistakes are made, it will bring heavy losses and regrets. Surprisingly, these mistakes are often the most common and easiest to avoid. Here are the top five mistakes to watch out for.

　"Reinventing the Wheel"

　You want to make your website unique and different from your competitors, this is what we understand.

But you don’t have to “reinvent the wheel.”

Apple did not design the iPhone from scratch. It's a beautiful smartphone assembled from different microprocessors, lithium batteries, firmware, capacitive screens and all the packaging. Even its proprietary operating system iOS is designed to imitate the UNIX operating system.

So don’t feel ashamed because you imitate other people’s websites. Their website may also be a copycat of someone else's website. It is human nature to create based on the existing, collected, and other people’s wisdom, and it is also the main way to promote the development of human society.

You don’t have to ask yourself to design a website that is unique and wonderful. It just needs to look and feel slightly better than other sites.

How to avoid this error?

Find a website that you and your customers like, get to know the style of the website, and experience what you like about it. Then type keywords related to your business into Google and click on the first few results in the search list.

Visit similarweb.com to see what other websites appear in your field of vision.

At the same time, you can also use websites such as iSpionage.com to quickly understand who your competitors are.

You think you know who your direct competitors are. In fact, when your target users search for websites based on search conditions in Google, they are your real competitors. Competitors who use Google Adwords are strongly attracting and gaining the attention of your target users.

　Not sure what you want your visitors to do

What do you want your visitors to do when they visit your website?

Think carefully for a moment...

The reality is that only a small percentage of your visitors will do what you want them to do. In the Internet world, getting a conversion rate of 2~5% is pretty good. Think about it, there are only 2 visitors out of 100. Don’t let this number get any lower!

You need to define clear goals for your visitors.

If you are involved in the service industry and want visitors to call you, then you should put your phone number at the top of the navigation.

If it is an e-commerce industry: you may want visitors to remember your best-selling products, or your most amazing sales.

Once you know what you want users to do, then you can design each individual page and the navigation structure of the website to try to achieve that goal.

Design a unified style theme for all web pages and enhance visitors’ user experience on the website.

　Think of yourself as a web designer

　 Especially for those developers who know how to use Photoshop.

Using Photoshop to make your "design" more beautiful will waste a lot of time. There are many hidden factors that may cost you a lot of time, such as color combinations, font styles, font sizes, alignment, white space, etc., but this is a breeze for professional web designers.

How to avoid it?

A better approach is to hire a graphic designer. You can hold a web design contest on a site like 99designs.com to discover your favorite designers.

　What you understand, I think web designers must also understand

This is the other extreme of the problem. You may want to outsource all your work. But outsourced designers may not understand your business and your customers as well as you do. You know and understand all the requirements, but does the outsourced designer understand the final visual product you need?

How to avoid it?

You can use Balsamiq or Mockingbird tools to create some wireframes. This allows you to focus on thinking about the visitor experience and helps you organize and structure your content.

This also provides a framework for your web designers to refer to so they can understand what you have in mind. It speeds up the website building process.

　Build a website based on a custom platform

　 Unless you are building a web application or a SaaS enterprise website, it is best to use a general framework.

If you need to constantly update your enterprise's content, you can use CMS, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

If you want to sell an item online, you need a shopping cart platform, you may use platforms such as bigcommerce.com, shopify.com, and Yahoo Store.

The main reason for using a widely adopted platform is that such a platform has good maintainability. You don't want only a few people in the world to be able to update and upgrade your website.

Migrating from one platform to another can be a pain, so choose your platform wisely.

If your website is built by an agency, be sure to ask them to use a well-known platform and do not use the agency's "patented" platform.

　Conclusion

You may have already understood the content mentioned in this article before. But are you using your existing knowledge to avoid these problems? Are you falling into the same traps over and over again because you haven’t taken any steps to avoid them? Take a step back, carefully review the problems, and develop a strategy to avoid them so you can achieve your plan.

English source: sitepoint.com