Whether you want to give your current interior designer website a makeover or build a new one, you definitely want to get it right. It's a significant investment, and website messaging and design best practices change all the time, often dictated by the latest online trends and changes in consumer behavior.
So, how can you keep pace with these changes and ensure your website isn't outdated or underperforming? One approach to building the best interior design website and copy begins with what not to do.
That’s the topic of today’s blog post: The top 10 website mistakes to avoid. Let's go!
First, don't sweat it if your website has any or all of these mistakes. They made our top 10 list because we see interior designers make these mistakes all the time. So you're definitely not alone!
Check out our list below to see what website mistakes you can correct today and build credibility online, attract more clients, and land more dream jobs.
Keep your industry acronyms and discussions about Bauhaus design, Enfilades, and Bouclé fabric for your internal design meetings. Including too much insider language on your website only serves one purpose: To alienate your audience.
Sure, you might feel tempted to show off how much knowledge you have about your craft, but it's all about the delivery. Make it digestible.
Your headline is that big bold statement you add to your hero banner at the very top of the homepage. It is estimated that it takes only 50 milliseconds (or less) to form an opinion about a website, so this piece of text is crucial to get right. Long-winded headlines will immediately bore your audience and make you easier to forget.
So, mention a key benefit or problem you're solving in the headline, but do it in as few words as possible. It has to be impactful, on-brand, and what your target audience ultimately wants your help with. Remember to speak to your audience rather than about yourself. Here's an example:
Luxury interior designer helping families in Florida reshape their homes with modern interiors.
Yep, quite the mouthful, right? Let's shorten to this instead:
Reshape your Florida home for family life with luxury interior design.
See the difference? We're getting our key points across and drawing the audience in by speaking directly to them.
Using passive language like "the home was being remodeled by the interior designer" instead of an active voice like "the interior designer remodeled the home" is a major website copy mistake we often encounter—-especially with calls-to-actions, or CTAs.
Using an active voice is important because it stops sentences from dragging on or becoming complicated.
When writing a CTA in an active voice, you want the subject to perform the action, rather than receive the action. Here's what we're talking about:
(Interior designer is the "subject")
Passive CTA:
Ready for your dream home to be brought to life by our interior designers?
Book a discovery call
Active CTA:
Let our interior designers bring your dream home to life.
Book a discovery call.
People generally prefer reading website copy in an active voice, so do your best to stick with this format as much as possible.
Do you have any pages on your interior design website with a CTA on the main banner but no other CTAs further down the page? You're likely losing precious conversions by keeping CTAs strictly at the top of each page.
It's a best practice to have at least two CTAs per page—one at the top for people who don't need to know more information because they have already decided to take action with you. The second CTA at the bottom of the page is for people who need to learn more before converting. Not having one here will likely lead to website visitors clicking away or getting distracted.
For interior designers, your imagery is everything. Showing off impressive photos of your finished work attracts and converts your target audience, but what happens when the images don't relate to the website copy?
A picture says a thousand words, so you want to choose and place them carefully to ensure they complement your copy, rather than take away from it or feel pointless.
There are no hard and fast rules here, but try to decide by asking yourself, "What is this picture symbolizing?" and "Is there a strong connection with the copy?"
There is nothing worse than exploring a website with boring, repetitive, confusing, or long-winded copy. Nobody wants to read massive chunks of text that say very little. They want to read very little text that says a lot.
Work on developing your unique tone of voice that fits your brand, key messaging points, and easy-to-understand descriptions for complex processes or services. Maybe even get the help of a professional copywriter to help you elevate your website copy.
A lead magnet is a valuable interior design resource, PDF, or guide that your audience can download on your website in exchange for their email address. Not having a lead magnet is a widespread website mistake that could cost you valuable clients because not everyone is ready to convert immediately.
By capturing your website visitors' email addresses, you'll be able to nurture a relationship with them via email marketing until they are ready to work with you. Some lead magnet examples for interior designers are:
This website mistake pretty much goes for all website banners: Don't rotate them too fast! Speedy rotations will only frustrate your audience as they won't have enough time to read the website copy on each banner before it flicks to the next one, giving them a poor first experience of your brand.
Anytime you use a rotating banner feature on your interior design website, make sure you test the speed by having a few people read it and adjust accordingly.
Your website isn't about you. It's about your clients. Avoid writing sentences that sound like "we do this, we do that, this is why we're great," because your clients will quickly lose interest. Instead, speak directly to your target audience with "your and you” sentences.
Talking about your clients' specific problems in your website messaging and showing them how working with you benefits them, rather than just talking about yourself, will form a stronger connection, build trust, and prove that you're here to help.
Your target audience shouldn’t have to work hard to figure out what you do, how you can help them, and their next steps. Navigating your website should be easy. No glitchy buttons, confusing menus, or complicated steps.
The journey from arriving on your website to booking a call should be quick, obvious, and painless. Overload your website with too much information, CTAs, images, buttons, and pages, and you'll overload your client and lose them. So, try to keep your website clean and simple.
We hope you have a clearer understanding of website best practices and how you can improve your website.
Remember, your website is your 24/7 salesperson that communicates how you can solve their problems and improve their lives. It's not the place to celebrate yourself.
Its number one job is to create leads. Get it right, and it can be your hardest-working sales machine, encouraging conversions online while you get on with other business priorities.
Ready to improve your website so you can start getting found online and winning your dream clients? Get help with your brand, website & SEO transformation and start your free audit today.
