7 Common Minisite Design Mistakes that You Must Avoid

Minisites have become a rage with both small wigs and big brands in corporate world. Design of minisite is most important to drive the target traffic in droves and even some minor mistakes may spoil your ambition. This article discusses about 7 common mistakes that you must avoid while creating a minisite design.

No plan in place

Every work of designing should start with proper planning. Before designing a minisite, you should spend significant amount of time to make a blueprint of overall site layout and structure including navigation and linking.

No keyword research

Keyword is one of the foundation pillars for your minisite. So, guess work is never a good idea; rather you have to make a list of them based on research. If this crucial step is missed, other parts of your web building will collapse like pack of cards, a including search engine optimization. Working on less-searched keywords will earn you no benefit.

Some website owners don’t have a list of specific keywords to attract traffic to their minisites. There are some keyword tools like goodkeyword, wordtracker, Google keyword suggestion tool where you can search keywords relevant to your business niche.

Slow loading

Your minisite design must load quickly – within only 8 seconds. If loading time is more than this timeframe, most of the visitors will move away. If there is more information to go through and navigate, the visitors will feel happy to stay on your minisite for a long time.

Overstuff your minisite

While designing your minisite, take care to make the look clutter-free. It is not a place for online art exhibition; instead a minisite is a promotional tool to market a single product or two. So, there is no need to fill it with bells and whistles. All these are fine to impress a child but cast a bad spell for flow of traffic and cash.

Keep use of graphics, Javascripts and flash animations to bare minimum because those are not indexed well by the search engines. Viewers prefer images to words but for search engines, the priority is just opposite. Keep it in mind that search

engine crawlers love only key phrases and value them. Those are what your target visitors use to enquire on search engines.

Dependence on HTML editors

Relying heavily on WYSIWYG HTML editors such as Mozilla Firefox, Frontpage will see your web pages drawn to either side of the screen instead of being centered. Also be in hang of basic HTML tags and what they do. More experienced coders make a good use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheet). However, you will not experience such problems on Dreamweaver.

No idea about color contrast

A minisite design that lacks color therapy never appeals to visitors. Use of dark color on a dark background makes objects and content look almost unreadable (and even invisible in worst case). Dark colors like black on white background create more visual appeal.

Visitors need to scroll to see images & content

The visitors feel annoyed if they need to scroll from side to side. So, restrict your minisite size to 750 pixels (maximum).