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The design of a website should follow a process defined by business requirements that are based on satisfying the goals of the website’s users, i.e. the people who will visit the website to complete a goal or who are in search of information.

But, often, such a process is not followed or followed only to a point, leading to web design projects that experience difficulty in achieving their stated goals or websites that do not appeal to their intended users.

In this article, we reveal four pitfalls that should be avoided to keep a web design project effortlessly on a course toward a successful launch:

1. Unrealistic expectations. Approaching a web design project with unrealistic expectations is one of the biggest mistakes a web project team can make. You may have heard the joke about the website that attempts to be Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, all at once, plus a little Twitter. It’s not a joke. It happens all the time, in varying degrees, building websites both large and small. The unfortunate result of unrealistic expectations is a website that attempts to do too many things for no one in particular and nothing particularly well.

Big ideas fuel the design of great websites. But without a clearly defined process based on commonsense user goals, a project’s big ideas can quickly become expectations that do not realistically service the needs of a website’s visitors.

2. Confusion of roles within a project team. Each web design project participant brings a set of unique and valuable skills to the process that only they can successfully utilize. Yet, participants will sometimes attempt to take on a role that doesn’t belong to them - especially when a design project hits the inevitable bump in the road.

While it might be tempting to believe that in the middle of a crisis or impasse, a client can become an experienced web designer or that a designer understands something about a business the client does not, it is just not the case.

Successful web design projects are typified by a process where participants contribute only according to their unique skills and understanding of a website’s users, while allowing other participants the freedom to do the same.

3. Assuming more design results in better designs. Occasionally, web design deliverables will be rejected for no identifiable reason, e.g., the design doesn’t “hit the mark” or “feel right.” Since a specific problem hasn’t been pinpointed, additional designs or combinations of multiple design directions are often called for as a way to resolve the problem.

Tread carefully. This is a trap. The presumption is that a flaw lurks, hidden, within the website’s design. Instead, it is more likely that important requirements have yet to emerge. Clear requirements defined in terms of user goals should make a flaw in the design obvious and easily corrected.

Successful web design is based on a process that works only if it is followed. Producing more design, instead of focusing on where the current designs do not satisfy all requirements, pushes the work outside of the design process, leading to arbitrary decision-making and unpredictable outcomes.

4. Allowing the web design process to become personal. As a web project participant, allowing the web design process to become personal means believing that a website is being designed for you - it is not. Websites are designed for end users (those who will actually visit the website in search of something) - and whose expectations when visiting a website (hopefully, captured in the project’s requirements) have little to do with many of the personalized criteria that can creep unnoticed into a web design project, i.e. “likes” and “dislikes”.

The success of a web design should be assessed by the same criteria actual website visitors use to judge their experience of the resulting website. Such as, how long it takes to find useful information, whether calls to action are easy to find, or how long it takes web pages to load.

With an expertise in web development, branding, cloud hosting, mobile app development, and CMS and e-commerce solutions, Avatar New York's top tier designers have the ability to create intelligent websites for any type of business.