Web Design: Five Ways New Business Enthusiasm Backfires

First published in 2015, rewritten in 2026 so the advice holds today.

Launching a new business, or relaunching an old one, tends to bring out the perfectionist in people. That enthusiasm is a good thing, but it often gets pointed at the wrong parts of a website. Owners spend weeks agonising over fonts and colours while the navigation confuses visitors and the mobile experience is an afterthought.

The mistakes below are the same ones we saw when this article was first written, and they're still costing businesses customers today. What's changed is the context: mobile is no longer a growing trend to keep an eye on, it's simply how most people browse, and Google now judges your site by its mobile version first.

Poor navigation

Simplicity has never gone out of fashion here. A navigation system that helps people find what they want beats one that looks clever but doesn't serve a purpose. Keep the structure logical, keep labels plain, and resist adding menu items just because you can.

• Group related pages under clear headings rather than a long flat list.
• Keep the main menu short. If you need a "more" or "other" catch-all, that's a sign your categories need rethinking.
• Make sure the path to your key conversion pages, whether that's a product, a quote form or a contact page, never takes more than two or three clicks.

Showing off

The temptation to build a website nobody can ignore is still strong, and it's now easier than ever thanks to animation libraries, video backgrounds and interactive effects. Used sparingly, these can work. Used everywhere, they slow the page down, distract from your message, and often achieve the opposite of what you intended.

There's an added cost now that didn't exist in 2015: heavy, effect-laden pages hurt your Core Web Vitals scores, which Google uses as part of its ranking signals. A clean, fast site isn't just better for conversions, it's better for search visibility too.

Ignoring mobile

The original advice here was that mobile traffic was catching up with desktop and should be treated as a priority. That's now understated. Mobile isn't a channel to prioritise alongside desktop, it's the default experience for most visitors, and Google has indexed the web on a mobile-first basis since 2018 or 2019 depending on the site. If your mobile site is a compromised version of your desktop one, you're not just losing customers, you're losing search rankings.

Practical checks worth doing regularly:

• Test your actual checkout or enquiry form on a phone, not just the homepage.
• Check tap targets, buttons and links are large enough to hit accurately with a thumb.
• Make sure page speed on mobile networks is acceptable, not just on office wifi.

Going against the grain

Every business wants to stand out, and that instinct can backfire when it's applied to the basics of how a website works. Visitors arrive with expectations: the logo sits top left and links home, the menu is where they expect it, the search icon looks like a magnifying glass. Break these conventions purely for the sake of being different and you add friction rather than personality.

Save your creativity for your photography, your copy, your brand voice and your product presentation. Keep the underlying mechanics familiar.

Content conundrums

Most web users are still impatient when hunting for information, arguably more so now given how much content competes for their attention. If what someone wants is buried under paragraphs of material they don't care about, they'll go elsewhere rather than dig for it.

The instinct to explain everything about your new business is understandable, but it has to be balanced against readability. A page dense with detail that nobody reads is worse than a shorter page that actually gets read. Break content into scannable sections, lead with the information people are actually searching for, and push background detail further down the page or onto a separate page entirely.

Takeaway

None of these five mistakes are new, and none of them are complicated to fix. Simple, logical navigation, restraint on visual flourishes, a mobile experience that's genuinely equal to desktop, familiar site mechanics, and content that's organised around what visitors need rather than what you want to say: get those right and the rest of your web design decisions become much easier.