Web Design Basics To Avoid On Your Site

By Author: Colin Stables
Total Articles: 14
Comment this article

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. Here are some common web design basics to avoid on putting your site for it doesn't matter if you have the greatest product in the whole world if your website is poorly designed you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the poor design.

When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphic design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many elements which contribute to a good website design, accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward, which is graphic design.

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site and use it as a road map and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take severe action!

1) Background music

Unless ...
... you are running a site which promotes a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound good to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site, users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics, user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you won't be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so over used to display advertisements that in my mind, 95% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker. if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its highlighted content immediately!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do . Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from presenting your content optimally!