5 Web Design Elements that Make Your Site Look Old School
In this Two Minute Tuesday, Matt will tell you how to keep your site looking so fresh and so clean in order to draw customers and increase conversions.
Watch today’s video to see if your site is guilty of any of these old school web design practices. Hi, there. Matt here. Your resident e-commerce guru at Volusion. Welcome to two-minute Tuesdays, where I give you two minutes of e-commerce advice to bolster your online success. In this day and age, design makes a difference. In fact, 75% of shoppers judge the credibility of your business based on your web design alone. Now, that being said, I'm here to walk you through 5 old-school design elements that make your site look like a blast from the past. First on our list is a complicated homepage. Now, while I can understand the idea behind packing your home page with lots of information, you want to keep things simple. This means you should avoid extraneous texture symmetry, and instead focus on driving shoppers deeper into your site. In other words, when it comes to your home page, design with a purpose. Are you using responsive design? If not, your site is stuck in the 20th century. Now for context, responsive design allows your site to optimally render on any device, including smartphones and tablets. So if your site takes a desktop only approach, you're missing out on delivering a great experience to almost half your visitors. The next design trend that needs to go involves dated fonts and color schemes. First, take a look at your fonts. Are you using something like Comic Sans or Times New Roman? If so, it's time to make a change. Next, study your color scheme. Wildly contrasting color choices like a black background with hot pink text just doesn't cut it anymore. So keep it simple, keep it clean, keep it modern. Fourthly, text heavy anything presents a problem for user experience. Like it or not, shoppers just don't like to read more. So if you got huge blocks of text throughout your site, look for ways to trim it down and incorporate high quality imagery, or even video to better tell your story. Lastly, watch out for overly stocky stock photos. Now don't get me wrong, there are a lot of beautiful stock photos out there, but there are also lots of overly generic and, quite frankly, lame looking images out there as well. My advice-- if you're using stock photos, make sure they're unique. As a wrap-up, each of these design faux pas have one thing in common-- they take away from the customer experience and dampen your brand's credibility. Have any questions? Feel free to drop me a line in the comments below. From me to you, happy selling. 
