Website design in Lausanne: 9 mistakes that could cost you clients

You’ve found a web agency, chosen your colours, approved a mock-up and started talking about your future homepage. Everything seems to be off to a perfect start.

And yet, that’s often exactly when the problems start.

Because designing a website in Lausanne isn’t just about making something pretty to look at. A good website needs to be quickly understood, work perfectly on mobile, be accessible to search engines and, above all… make people want to go further.

In other words: your website isn’t a digital wall decoration.

It’s a business tool.

1. Starting with design rather than strategy

“We want something modern, with black, animations and a big hero video.”

Fair enough.

But why?

Before choosing a typeface or a transition animation between two sections, you need to know what the website is meant to achieve.

Showcase a company? Generate quote requests? Book meetings? Sell online? Get phone calls? Build your local visibility in Lausanne and the canton of Vaud?

These goals directly shape the site structure, web design, UX, content and calls to action.

A well-designed website therefore rarely starts with Photoshop or Figma. It starts with a much less glamorous question:

“What do we want the visitor to do here?”

2. Making a beautiful website… that nobody understands

This is probably one of the most common mistakes in website design.

Everyone wants to be original. So explicit headings get replaced with poetic phrases, information gets hidden behind animations, and the menu turns into an interactive experience.

The result: visitors arrive and wonder what you actually do.

Good UX design isn’t about impressing people at all costs. It’s about guiding them.

Within a few seconds, your visitor should understand:

• what you do;

• who you do it for;

• where you operate;

• why they should choose you;

• and what action they can take.

You can then add the animations, micro-interactions and little touches that designers love. But in that order.

The “Book a meeting” button should stay a “Book a meeting” button. Not “Enter the universe.”

3. Thinking about mobile after desktop

Another classic: designing a beautiful desktop version, then asking someone to “do the mobile version” at the end.

Bad idea.

Google now uses the mobile version of content for indexing and ranking websites. Google also recommends responsive design to make maintenance easier and offer a consistent experience across devices.

Mobile shouldn’t be the little sister dressed in desktop’s hand-me-downs.

You need to think from the design stage about text size, buttons, spacing, menus, forms and images.

A website can look stunning on a 27-inch screen and become an obstacle course on an iPhone.

And your prospect isn’t going to zoom in with a magnifying glass.

4. Neglecting site speed

A beautiful 18MB background video, twelve different fonts, animations everywhere and a few “essential” plugins later… your website has officially signed up for a slowness subscription.

Performance is nonetheless an integral part of the user experience. Google specifically recommends monitoring Core Web Vitals, which measure a page’s loading, responsiveness and visual stability.

The main indicators include:

• LCP: how fast the main content displays;

• INP: responsiveness during interactions;

• CLS: the page’s visual stability.

The good news? You don’t need to strip your website of all personality to make it fast.

You mainly need to work smart: compressed images in the right formats, deferred loading where relevant, optimised code, high-performance hosting and cutting unnecessary resources.

5. Forgetting SEO during the build

“We’ll do the SEO afterwards.”

That sentence has probably cost quite a few developers some hair.

The SEO shouldn’t be a coat of paint added to a finished website. Page structure, titles, URLs, content, internal links and site architecture directly influence how Google can understand your pages. Google specifically recommends making it easier to crawl, index and understand content right from the design stage.

For a company that wants to appear in local searches, this also means thinking about the services offered, the geographic areas targeted and the intent behind the searches.

Creating one giant “Services” page with everything mixed together isn’t always the best strategy.

Sometimes, a clear, dedicated page per service will be far more effective.

6. Copying the text from your old website

Another big temptation: reusing existing content, tweaking a couple of sentences and calling the new website done.

The problem? Your old website may have been written eight years ago.

Since then, your offering has evolved, so has your customer base, and your company probably even more so.

Building a new website is therefore an excellent opportunity to rework your digital communication:

• simplify your messaging;

• clarify your offers;

• highlight benefits rather than just features;

• address prospects’ objections;

• include proof: past work, reviews, figures, testimonials.

Your website should speak to your customers. Not to your internal committee.

7. Piling on features “just because you can”

A chatbot? Why not.

A configurator? If it’s useful.

A 3D scroll animation? Maybe.

A member area with artificial intelligence, a lunar calendar and connections to 14 APIs?

Let’s take a two-minute breather.

Every feature needs a reason to exist. It should improve the experience, simplify a task or contribute to the website’s goal.

Otherwise, it just becomes another source of maintenance, bugs and potential slowdowns.

8. Not planning a genuine call to action

You’ve explained what you do.

Presented your services.

Added your past work.

Talked about your team.

Included three testimonials.

Now what?

What’s the visitor supposed to do?

A good website needs to offer clear, consistent CTAs: request a quote, call, book, buy, book a meeting, discover an offer…

The CTA obviously depends on what you do, but it has to be obvious.

Because a visitor who’s convinced but lost is still… a lost visitor.

9. Thinking that going live is the end of the project

On launch day, everyone’s happy.

The champagne is virtual, the “publish” button gets pressed, and your new website finally appears online.

But the work doesn’t stop completely there.

A website needs to be monitored, updated, secured and improved based on how it’s actually used. Google specifically recommends using Search Console to track the site’s search performance and spot any issues.

The data then lets you answer much more interesting questions than “do you like the colour of the button?”:

• Which pages actually get visited?

• Where do visitors come from?

• Where do they drop off along the way?

• Which searches generate impressions?

• How many visitors actually become prospects?

A good website in Lausanne isn’t just about how it looks

Building a website in Lausanne needs to strike a balance between several disciplines: strategy, content, UX/UI design, web development, performance and SEO.

Design grabs attention.

UX smooths the journey.

Content reassures.

Development makes it all work.

And SEO lets your website be found.

Together, these elements turn a simple brochure website into a genuine tool for digital communication and acquisition.

And that’s precisely where the difference lies between “having a website” and having a website that actually works for your business.

Why this article?

Because a website project represents a significant investment for a company. And it’s a shame to spend time and budget on a website that could have been far more effective with a few good decisions made from the outset.

This article was designed to give companies in Lausanne, and more broadly SMEs across French-speaking Switzerland, a simple framework before launching their project.

The technical recommendations relating to mobile, performance and SEO were verified against official Google Search Central resources.

This article was written by the Wecode team with the help of artificial intelligence tools, then reviewed and approved by our experts.

Your future website deserves more than just a “nice-looking site”

At Wecode, we design websites by working on design, user experience, development, performance and SEO together.

Brochure website, e-commerce, redesign or more specific development: the goal stays the same. Build a digital tool that fits your business and can support your growth.

Because at the end of the day, your website doesn’t need to be the most spectacular one in Lausanne.

It just needs to be the one that makes people want to choose you.