UX Best Practices: Three Common Marketing Website Mistakes

These are the most common marketing website mistakes we see during our research at Voice+Code:

User goals and business goals are not aligned. Before you embark on a redesign, ensure user goals and business goals align. If they don’t, your team will end up making design decisions that will ultimately backfire. Don’t force users to do things that take them away from accomplishing their end goal. For example, a popup asking users to sign up for your newsletter when they’ve barely read your hero copy is intrusive and annoying. Instead, help users accomplish their goals while simultaneously helping your organization accomplish yours: a win-win. The best way to find this alignment is through ongoing user research in the form of field studies, one-on-one user interviews, and usability studies.
Users don’t know what your organization does or why they should care. The first time a user arrives on your homepage, they want to know what your organization does and how you can help them. Keep language simple and focus on succinctly answering these two items as quickly as possible. The rest of the homepage and website should be devoted to supporting these statements.
The website’s information architecture is confusing. Your organization’s information architecture—how things are named, organized, and structured—should support the tasks users want to accomplish. Content should be thoughtfully named and arranged according to how your users think about things: their mental models.

Don’t waste money designing a new marketing website if you haven’t gotten these basics right.