Web Design Mistakes That You Should Avoid

Web design is not just about getting the colors right or the font in the right place – it goes way beyond that. Quite frequently it is useful to study web design mistakes just so you will increase your knowledge base.

When somebody visits your website, it shouldn’t take them more than a few seconds to figure out what your site is about. If visitors to your web site have trouble understanding what your site is about, they will tend to leave quickly. You just cannot induce any discomfort on your visitors, with your site, and have any reasonable expectation for them to continue using it.

As you know, online readers do not generally spend a lot of time reading because they skim text; so that means your text has to be formatted to support that. Bear in mind the reading level you need to write for on the web is about the eighth grade – appalling but true. Think about using more white background space because that makes it a lot easier to read the page. Also, when it comes to fonts, make them the standard fonts that are easy to read. If you do anything that takes away from reader comfort, then you will lose your visitors’ attention.

If you look around, you’ll find that the majority of the big websites have one thing in common – clean URL structures. You can still see them with affiliate URLs, but even with those you can get a URL cloaking script. Perhaps the only times when this is a serious issue is if you want to brand your domain name.

Overall, you will find out that one of those ugly looking affiliate URL’s will not rank so well in the search engines. There are other concerns with this issue of ugly URLs, but it is really up to you as far as what you want to do about it. Other issues is that they are cumbersome for people to deal with, and that is never good. But if you have a blog, then it is a different story because you have choices with changing the URL structure.

Ever visited a site that takes forever to let you inside? We are specifically talking about Flash intros, or splash pages, that some designers like to use. This is one of the more frequent web design mistakes that designers make, probably because they feel that it is a really “cool” effect – but it is no good from a marketing point of view. We would always tell anyone to avoid using this kind of flash introduction, but you can also give people the option to skip the intro. It is just that people are generally in a hurry, and also using this technique can be wrongly interpreted as plain advertising. How ever you use the flash, or what you put in it, can be suitably placed elsewhere. In conclusion, from the above article it becomes clear that there in order to make your site successful, you need to give extra emphasis to the design.

To sum up, the above is just a general outline of some web design mistakes that one encounters most commonly and that should be avoided at all costs.

Tagged as: website design