Top 6 Web Design and Development Mistakes Made by Agencies in Dubai

When it comes to web design and development, Dubai is, like in most things, quickly approaching a global standard of quality and professionalism. However, even top agencies still make some rookie mistakes that discredit their work and convey a negative impression to website viewers. From missing user interface elements to spelling errors in the first few words of a blog post, there is a whole array of frequently seen errors that potential leads and clients can see when browsing agency websites in Dubai. Here are the top six mistakes that we see on a daily basis and strive to avoid in our work.

Headings
It is surprising how many web design agencies in Dubai still have multiple first level headings, headings around random, meaningless snippets of text, or sometimes no headings at all! You don’t need to be an SEO agency to put a little effort in and make your website go a long way in terms of search engine results. To top it off, ordering your content in a way that allows for proper heading use means you probably structured it in a way that is the most logical and useful to website visitors. Taking care of your headings helps your website’s design on several important levels. Ensure you have only one h1 heading, and make them logical and descriptive and your pages will immediately improve.

Load Time
Such a staple of web design still goes unapplied by some Dubai web design agencies. Most images used on a web page will never be seen in full-screen resolution, so why have them in that quality? This practice simply increases load time for everyone and data costs for mobile users. Furthermore, crawlers will detect this and report it to search engines which will penalize the website and worsen its rankings. Agencies should think about how the images will be viewed and compress and adjust them accordingly. It might be better to have extremely large images only appear as thumbnails and open only when clicked.

Weak Content
People hear about content marketing and keyword density and think they can publish any piece of text on their website, no matter how incomprehensible, and skyrocket to number one in SERPs. Web design agencies in Dubai are especially prone to horrible typos, grammatical errors, and redundant text that does little more than waste the viewer’s time. Most word processing software have built-in spellcheck so mistakes are not excusable, and search engine algorithms know this. Websites with terrible copywriting are not only penalized by search engines, but also drive off potential clients. How unprofessional does it look when an agency that offers blogging as a service has mistakes in every single one of its blog articles? Double check your content and make sure it is all relevant, which brings us to the next point, duplicate content.

Duplicate content
The UAE is the only place where you regularly see websites with identical, copy-pasted content across multiple pages. Sometimes, web design agencies in Dubai copy content across domains and even forget to edit the name of the company they’re lifting content from. These practices are not only insulting to any website visitors, but are also, in theory, sanctioned by google. In order to rank and maintain that spot, content needs to be original and highly relevant. We recommend using canonicalization and limiting any repetition to a minimum in order to avoid penalties.

Broken Features
It is not unusual to find a broken link or a feature that simply does not work on websites of web design agencies in Dubai. Seeing an agency that is supposed to design and develop websites for others unable to make their own site functional does not inspire confidence in customers, in fact it does the opposite. There are multiple tools that allow you to check the validity and quality of internal links so there’s no excuse to having a path on your sitemap that’s a dead end at a broken link. This is a sure way to ruin the user experience and have people leave your website. If a feature is unfinished, consider either delaying putting it up at all or giving a warning that it is coming soon, and all features should be tested periodically to ensure they still work.

No-Response Contact Forms
You enter your details and click on submit and never get a response, or even worse, nothing happens. Sounds familiar? This is something web design agencies in Dubai are still having trouble implementing – quality contact forms. What we recommend is a form that not only sends you to another screen (or gives a popup) indicating it has been successfully submitted, but also immediately sends you a response saying your request is under review and you will be contacted shortly. This way, the user can be sure that their request has gone through and won’t immediately move on. You could also implement a chat feature and have someone at the office reply to their enquiry immediately. If you care to your leads more rapidly, they are far more likely to convert.
Web design agencies in Dubai still have quite a bit to learn and implement in their practices and their work, but if you follow the tips given in this article, you’re sure to get ahead of the curve in at least a couple of areas.

Luka Stanojevic
Digital Marketing Manager

Luka Stanojevic is a digital marketing manager at Emirates Graphic, a Dubai-based digital marketing and web design agency. He has helped companies of all sizes and from all parts of the world grow and succeed on the web.