Web design trends change rapidly, making it quite tricky to tell good design from bad. And a beautiful website design is the first step to winning over craft beer lovers to your brewery’s pride and joy.
As nebulous as good design might be, there are certain timeless golden guidelines. By spending some time looking at enough websites, certain design patterns begin to emerge.
- A simple navigation
- Use of animation
- Color scheme
- A neat design An attractive interface
- Choosing a design that fits the theme
- Organizing design and content
Ultimately, effective web design should be visually beautiful, simple to comprehend, and easy to use.
This post will cover the top website design mistakes to avoid in order to draw your customers in, and wow them with your commitment to quality and great customer service.
Slow Page Loading
Slow loading websites easily lose visitors. Because internet consumers are impatient, have short attention spans, and have many of options.
Slow denotes anything that takes more than a few seconds to load. Literally. Google claims that 53% of mobile consumers abandon websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load.
Speed is very important for SEO. Google loves faster-loading pages because they are more user-friendly. Fast-loading pages (within three seconds) frequently equal more conversions, purchases, and sign-ups. Hooray!
Three ways to speed up loading:
- Select a high-performance web hosting provider.
- Optimize your images
- CSS, JavaScript, and HTML coding
Overlooking a Mobile Responsive Design
According to Hubspot, a non-responsive design is a leading reason why users quit a website, according to 73.1% of web designers. Why? It's all about the user experience.
With mobile-responsive design, your site reformats and displays seamlessly on mobile devices. A non-responsive website is difficult to browse on a phone screen and will suffer in the SERPs. With the surge of mobile use, non-responsive site design is a must-avoid.
Most DIY website builders include mobile-friendly layouts, and any quality web designer can develop one for you.
Three mobile-friendly design recommendations:
- Make your navigation menu a ‘hamburger'
- Consider designing for mobile first.
- Ensure buttons are clickable on tiny displays.
Stock Visuals and Photos
Visuals are more essential than ever. Visually rich websites signal to visitors that this business “gets it” and is ahead of the curve.
While stock photographs have its place in web design, using generic stock photos in the food and beverage industry is a big no-no.
Posting stock imagery makes visitors question the integrity and quality of your product. If the pictures of your craft beer look generic or even “sketchy”, you’re not going to sell many 6-packs.
Take your own photos, or hire a professional to shoot and edit them. This goes for your company photos as well. Genuine, high-resolution pictures of your brewery’s people and products will go a long way in telling your story and building trust and brand loyalty.
Using a Crowded Design for Your website
Your website is a wonderful marketing tool, but you must avoid the urge to stuff it full of sales pitches. A crowded and busy appearance has diminishing rewards.
Good site design is simple. The days of crowded webpages with plenty of showy components are gone. Less is more these days. They value white space and make do.
Clean up your site and remove everything unrelated to your USP. Visuals are worth 1,000 words. Limit your usage of copy and learn to demonstrate rather than tell.
Three decluttering design suggestions:
- Use whitespace
- Don't over-image the page.
- Make a scannable menu
Bad SEO
Use SEO tools to get your site on the top page of search engines like Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Keywords, for example, may boost your site's traffic by increasing the amount of individuals who type them in.
Also, current material might increase traffic, so you can either speed learn best SEO practices and D.I.Y. it or find an expert freelance marketer to build and operate a blog all about craft brewed beers.
Weak call to action (or none at all)
People need to be prodded. It might feel pushy to some, but as a business owner, you need to take the burden of decision-making off your customers’ shoulders. The call-to-action might be ‘click here', ‘sign up', or ‘buy now', whatever it is, it must be clear and simple. Don’t assume your potential buyers know what you want them to do.
As obvious as this might feel, missing or unclear calls-to-action are one of the most typical site design errors. Don’t be that business owner.
Additionally, your C.T.A buttons need to be clean, eye-catching, and trustworthy. Otherwise, visitors will either ignore your ‘spammy' CTA or miss it completely.
Three quick C.T.A. wins:
- Keep the buttons simple.
- Experiment with vibrant hues.
- Put the button someplace visible.
Examples of Great Brewery Website Design
These 15 genuine brewery websites are aimed to inspire you with new approaches to show off your own brand and improve brewery visitor and customer rates.
Camden Town Brewery: Their webpage features each beer's individuality and flavor, inviting customers to pick one they enjoy.
3 Floyds: This artisan brewery employs elaborate, drawn artwork to compliment its distinct flavor.
Thorn Brewing: Thorn Brewing's website employs plenty of white space to emphasize on the brewery's goal of building community via events and newsletters.
Hopewell Brewing: Hopewell Brewing's website is easy to browse and well-branded.
Russell Brewing Co: Russell's website design is vintage with a current, stylish touch.
Driftwood Brewery:: The brewery's website highlights how quality is prioritized by showing team members walking through the manufacturing process from fermentation to the bar.
Conclusion
The worst web design flaws create the poorest user experience. The user experience is at the heart of web design.
You now have clear idea of website design mistakes to look for and root out: slow page loading times, an unresponsive mobile interface, too much clutter, little or no SEO, and missing calls to action.
On the flip side, you’ve got a taste of great brewery websites to use as inspiration for your own design.
Apply the best practices in the post to create an inviting and intuitive website that will get first time visitors excited to learn more about your brand and try your thirst-quenching brew.
Grab a drink and start now!
P.S. if anyone from Arbor Brewing Company reads this, give me a call and let's talk about speeding up your site. ❤️