What Not To Do When Designing A Website

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Below are 10 tips of what not to do when designing a website.

1. Flashy intros. Many consumers and designers think flash is great. Flash is great in small doses but there is nothing worse than waiting 5 minutes for a website to load only to see some flash effects. If your internet connection is slow there is nothing worse. Also it does nothing for search engines. In other words if you want your site to get found by someone searching in Google you can forget it. Search engines cannot read flash.
2. Pop ups. You visit a site, realise that it's not what you're looking for so click the back button, but the website has blocked your browser and is throwing loads of pops up ads at you, as you close each one down more keep popping up.
3. A pet hate of mine is horizontal scrolling. There is nothing worse than having to scroll from left to right to read each line of a website. This is poor design in my eyes and should never be implemented.
4. Moving images and words. Flashing banners, graphics moving across the screen, a stupid trail following the mouse. There is nothing more off putting than moving ...
... stuff and is a great way to make people click that back button.
5. No contact details. This is an obvious one really, if a website doesn't have a phone number or address then what is the point in having the website in the first place.
6. Overuse of banners. Sites that have too many banners are very off-putting. Some banners are just not even relevant to the site you are on so what is the point? Also sites where Google adds or banners are strategically placed so that you accidently click on them.
7. Lots of bright non contrasting colours. Colours should be to a minimum. Multi coloured text on the site is also a no no.
8. Poor spelling and grammar. These days there is no excuse for spelling mistakes as spell checkers are everywhere, so seeing poor spelling and bad grammar is just a sign of sloppy work. If your website looks sloppy, then you're not going to get many sales or enquiries from it.
9. Slow load time. This is a major problem on ecommerce sites as they will have many products with images which can cause slow page loads. People will look elsewhere if they have to wait for each page to load.
10. Poor navigation. There is little point having a website if the navigation is so poor visitors can't find what they are looking for. From the home page everything should be within 2 or 3 clicks max.
Moustique Design are a London based web development company offering website design london, ecommerce websites london, graphic design, business website design and much more.