If your website was designed a few years ago, there’s a bright possibility that there are a few elements which are unpleasant guests. They are outdated and need to be removed immediately from the website so that the website doesn’t look outdated. The world of web keeps changing every day and it’s essential that your website also keeps itself abreast with the new developments and advancements. This calls for a removal of certain outdated trends and practices. Here’s a list of 5 Don’ts that you should keep in mind while finalizing your website design.

1. Never Keep Social Media Icons In The Header

The header of your website is one of the most important areas of your website. This area gets the utmost attention and must be filled with the critical elements to which you want users to focus the most. Keeping flashy social media icons right at the top of your website layout is only inviting trouble in a quiet way. It takes a lot of efforts to get users on to the website, and by placing social media icons you’re guiding them to bounce off from your website to your social media handles. That will result in a high bounce rate.

Instead, you should use social media widgets which allow users to like your page etc. all within the environment of your website. That’s just a smarter way of letting people interact with you through social media.

2. Avoid Stock Photos

Pictures play a huge role when it comes to convincing users. Studies have shown that pictures have an excellent positive impact in terms of conversion as well. However, if they are not authentic and are simply obvious stock photos, users are not going to buy them. By obvious stock photos, we mean a smiling pretty girl’s face, the corporate handshake, the light bulb and much more. People have started undermining these stock photos and more than often make fun of the websites that use them.

When people will come across these stock photos on your website, they will not only find it cliched, they will also lose faith in your company. Instead, you can use custom photography and use real photos of your office, staff, and leaders. These are impossible to fake and are bound to create a solid impression

3. Get Rid Of The Email Links

If you have anything like staff Bio Pages, a very common practice is to use a little link to send email to that particular person. This is not the best of the practices. Firstly, it attracts email spamming. Spam marketers are always on a lookout for this kind of things. Secondly, it’s a real disaster when it comes to User Experience. Think about when you click on one of those. It opens up some kind of native email program on your computer like Microsoft Outlook or Apple email program. That’s just annoying.

Instead, you should use email sending forms. They are trackable, you can route them to different folders and subfolders using email programs, and can easily bifurcate client requests, internal queries etc.

4. Disable YouTube Suggested Videos

With the ongoing trends in website designing, videos have become a crucial part of any website design and YouTube is undoubtedly the biggest source of it. If you use videos anywhere on your website, you must disable the YouTube suggested videos option. What happens is that when a Youtube video plays, it makes some interesting suggestions about other videos that might be related to the video that you just watched. But, at best these videos might be simply unrelated and at worst they might be videos about your competitors.

Either way, it acts as a distraction for your users and has no connection whatsoever with what you want the users to do when they are on your website. This option can be disabled by going to the Share option, then to the embed option, then Show More and unchecking the Show suggested videos when the video finishes option.

5. Bye Bye PDFs

PDFs were used to be a workaround for the non-content managed websites for long. For example, if you need to add a new document or add a new menu on to your website you make a new PDF, upload it and replace the other one so that people can download and get the newest information.

But, these days almost every website is content managed using tools like WordPress where you can quickly log in and change information without actually touching the code. So basically, these PDFs are completely irrelevant today. Still, there are a lot of websites, especially restaurant websites which frequently change their menu by changing PDFs rather than actually changing on the website which is a complete NO NO.

Conclusion

If you’re playing the game of web, you cannot be stagnant. Trends which are super cool today may find a need to be thrown away tomorrow. The key is to understand what is working today, what needs to be forgotten, and predicting what future holds for us. Get in touch with our design experts to get more insight regarding the same.

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