Top10 Web Design Mistakes

1. Difficult to read

You would intuitively think that the number one consideration when creating a new website is to make it easy for the visitor to read. But even after a good 10 years of the commercial internet, it is amazing how many websites are unreadable.

- Text that is too small

- Blocks of coloured text on a dark background or worse still on patterned backgrounds

- Using a font style that is difficult to read from a screen

 

2. Pages are too cluttered with not enough white space

Space is cheap on the internet, but it still doesn’t stop people trying to cram huge amounts of information onto a single page. They feel that they have to fill every bit of available space - white space is good !

3. Having a meaningless flash animation as a home page

There is nothing that annoys most internet users than arriving at a Home Page and having to sit through a series of animated images before arriving at any useful information. If you visit the top 100 sites in the world, not one of them has a flash animation intro.

If they don’t, you shouldn’t! Time is valuable to internet users, don’t squander it and annoy them with designer rubbish.

  

4. Reinventing navigation

There is only one reason for having a menu of links on a site and that is to make it easy for the visitor to find their way around. The key word being easy! Just list the different parts of the site in the left hand navigation panel. This is where people intuitively look, so let them find what they’re looking for.

 

5. Don’t change the look and feel of every page

This doesn’t happen so much these days, but bear it mind. It used to be a common practise to have different colours, fonts and designs in different parts of the site. This just tends to confuse the reader.

6. Building a site with no thought for Search Engine Optimisation

This is a really common trait amongst designers. If your goal is to be found by search engines there are a number of considerations to be built in right from the planning stage. It is a lot more difficult and expensive to go back and change a site for SEO once it has been designed and delivered.

 

7. Creating a graphics scrapbook

Never confuse eye-candy with content. Many site owners load up as many graphics and images as they can because they can. They argue that images capture their visitor’s attention. That is true, but they can also distract visitors from what you really want them to focus on; the value of your product.

8. Slow loading pages

By building huge, graphic-rich pages you increase the time it takes to load up on the users screen. This is the one problem listed here that is actually getting worse, rather than better.

 

9. Horizontal scrolling

Luckily this has become quite rare today. Horizontal scrolling is when a user has to move the page to the right to see all the content on it. Some horizontal scrolling pages can have four or five pages worth of content to the right of the first page. Users hate this so never let your designer convince you it’s a good idea.

 

10. Burying essential information too deep

 Web surfers are impatient people! They don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to find what they’re looking for on your site. According to Gartner Group 50% of all sales are lost because users can’t find what they are looking for.

If you’ve buried information too deep or not made the sign up process clear, you could be loosing half of your potential audience and customers. Getting it Right! Don’t make your customers waste their time scrolling down pages or clicking to go to new pages to find what they are looking for. Get it upfront. Hit them between the eyes with who you are and what you offer.

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