Many websites bombard their visitors with all sorts of unnecessary bells and whistles that confuse the visitor, who is really looking for the website's content.
Bad design gets in the way of good content. If your design is intrusive, difficult to read, or poorly signposted, then your visitors will go elsewhere. This is particularly true for websites. We all know that reading a screen is more of a strain on the eyes than the printed page so people get impatient with websites. If they can't get to grips with your site quickly and easily they'll just give up, and go somewhere else.
Often "more is less" when it comes to good web design. Sites that have little worthwhile content often try to compensate with all sorts of fancy tricks and many web designers go overboard simply to show off their skills. The first golden rule of web design is - just because the bells & whistles are available doesn't mean they have to be used!
Good Website practice includes :
- Design that fits your business's image
- Content that is relevant and up to date
- Fast loading pages and images
- Navigation you can understand in seconds
- Text you can read (size / colour / background)
- No spelling mistakes, and reasonably grammatically correct
- Thumbnails with click to enlarge, if there are a lot of, or detailed pictures
- Works on any browser (web-safe colours, and other potential issues)
- Can be "bookmarked" (=Favourites) ..... Not all can
- Easy to find contact details
- Search engine friendly
The following are examples of bad practice :
- Too many colours and fonts
- Hit counters, usually designed to look like a milometer on a dodgy used car - and just as reliable!
- Silly mouse trails
- Meaningless clocks … Good lunchtime, it is Monday 24 January, and the time is roughly 0:26:09.4 pm … the thing about these clocks is that they take the time from your computer’s clock and pretend it comes from the website (PC clocks are notoriously inaccurate)
- Pages that keep changing will slow down your computer (they are taking up some of its "horsepower")
- Broken links within the website
- Long, pompous and irrelevant Flash intros
- Pictures that scroll across the screen for no apparent reason.
- Javascript or other errors
- Really busy pages that leave you in a helpless heap of confusion
- Text that's too big and text that's too small.
- Irritating popup windows that you didn't ask for
- Adverts for things that are not relevant to your website
- PAGES THAT SHOUT AT YOU IN BLOCK CAPITALS!
- Speling misteaks or typpos and gramaticul errers.
- Forms that give an error but don't say what was wrong and then wipe out what you just painstakingly typed in.
- "Under Construction" signs. Your visitor has just waited for the page to load, now they know there's a good chance the next link will be "under construction" too, so they leave. If a page isn't finished don't publish it - simple.
- Animated images and flashing text - visitors don't like you giving them a headache.
- Text that jumps out at you or moves around when you hover over it.
- Long passages of white or light coloured text out of black or very dark background. This is so hard to read for any length of time. It might be fine for one to five words in a heading, but no more. And visitors won’t thank you for using up their ink cartridge, when they print the page!
- Text in a colour that is similar to the background colour so you have to squint at it. It just might look fine to you, but not to the majority of site visitors.
- Painful background images that mean you can't read the text.
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