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. It doesn't matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components 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 as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, 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 pleasant 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 blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine 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 function 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 effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!
Dare To Take The Ultimate Lazy Guys Way To Success!
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Web Design Elements You Should Avoid Having on Your Site
Friday, March 13, 2009
How To Spice Up The Dullest Website With Creative Web Design Elements
Creative web design should be a fundamental part of any business website to make its presence felt on the net. Do you know that your site visitors can only allow you less than five seconds before deciding your site isn’t worth their while? Armed with this information, you should check whether your website is effectively grabbing your customers’ attention or not.
Just because you’re making money on your online business right now doesn’t mean your customers don’t need any special attention. As any good online entrepreneur knows, the customer is always the most vital aspect in every business.
Owing to this, it is essential to study who your visitors and customers are so you can generate a site that appeals to them. Creating a website designed for your customers’ convenience can ensure your business’s growth due to increased traffic, sales profit and repeat customers.
Work with creative elements
Great-looking web pages are built using the creative elements of web design. If you are working with a professional web designer who is familiar with this concept, they can express your desired message through a creative layout that blends the right elements fonts, colors, shading, graphics, and the required spacing.
If the right elements are mixed together, your visitors will have a more pleasant browsing experience without even noticing that everything has been put together by innovative web design. Put up a hastily done job and your visitors are out of your website before it can even fully load.
Match the text size with your audience
You should also consider the size of your text’s font. Visitors won’t stick around long enough in your site to figure out what is written just because your font size is too small to be read comfortably. If your website is specifically for elderly people, it’s safe to assume that most of them have eye problems and you must use a larger font size (12 or higher), with black text over a light background.
A website that causes eyestrain
Also check that your website is not too outdated with too much of everything crammed on a single page:
• Thousands of words per page
• Animated icons and buttons
• Flashing ad banners and a frenzy of colors
All of these can create a lot of distraction and may cause quite a confusion as to where the visitor should start reading or searching. While a lot of useful information can be found on your website, visitors will be too mixed-up to notice it. If you were the visitor, you’d probably head out fast and find a website that wouldn’t make you dizzy.
Pay attention to time and budget
Before starting a design project, be sure to inform your web designer of the type and appearance of the website you want to create. Letting them know of the things you want to include and things you want to omit will move your project faster and within its budget. Making an example of other websites can help your web designer understand the type of look you plan for your website.
It pays to know that the creative elements of an outstanding website are put together with your customers in mind. Visit your competition’s website and find out what your visitors can see in them. Ask your designer to come up with a much better site than your rivals by using creative design elements and watch your customers come in.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Web Design Elements You Should Avoid
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.
It doesn't matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about a good graphical design.
A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many components 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 as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, 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 pleasant 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.