August 23, 2008

Bad Website Design - Avoid Them At All Cost

Filed under: Uncategorized — @ 1:01 am

Avoid the mistakes of other website designers who make bad website design choices

Websites and blogs are easier than ever to setup. Gone are the days when setting-up sites can only be done by IT guys or web geeks. Using free Content Management Systems or blog platforms, everyone has an even chance to have their own online presence. However, the easy road to setting up sites does not always translate to websites with good website designs. At some point or another, you must have seen websites with bad designs. A bad website design is very easy to identify. Unconsciously, we determine a site to be ugly based on some common characteristics. This article discusses the common traits of bad website design. With this knowledge, you, as a website designer, will be fully armed to avoid these bad website design mistakes. Here are a few pointers to help you get started.

Background And Text

Dark background, incompatible color combination of background and text, or very small font size makes for very hard reading. Stay away from stylish fonts but instead use sans-serif fonts for your contents. Having the proper color mix and good font size will increase usability of your site and make a big impact on the visitors’ experience.

Communication Style

It is nice to appear smart and intelligent but geek speak or highly intellectual postings will not be perceived well by your visitors. Each of your webpage should not be used for showing off your linguistic prowess or technically-laden lingo. The usual rule here is to clearly communicate with your visitors in an easy to understand, grammatically-sound, direct to the point format. Technical details should be presented in the language level of your visitors.

Graphics

Having nice large graphics is only appropriate for printed advertisement. On the Net, it is better to utilize easy-to-load graphics so webpages are loaded quickly. If your website can’t serve up information swiftly and the longer your visitors become idle, the faster your visitors will leave your site never to go back.

Templates and Navigation

As much as possible, have a consistent look and feel in your website thru the use of templates. If your visitors have to re-familiarize and re-learn the headers, navigation and footers for every webpage, your visitors will eventually get tired and leave.

Pop-ups

Unless you can justify it, never use pop-ups. It is by far the single most frustrating thing your visitor encounters while surfing. When visitors close the pop-ups, they will also close your site, never to be irritated again.

As regularly creating websites for my clients, I see a lot of web designers both good and bad. More oftenFree Reprint Articles, the bad web designers have mastered the science and art of bad and ugly website design. I’m pretty sure this article uncovers your eyes and will help you spot the difference between the two.

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William D. Jimenez runs a website that uncovers the complexities of website design that can rank high in the Search Engines. There are 33 things you need to know before choosing your web design team. To take advantage of this cool stuff and more, make sure you check out William’s site at www.will2design.com.

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Website design is important in your online business, and don?t not overlook obvious faults or omissions with it. There are some simple glaring errors that you might fail to notice because you are not using your own website yourself, and others that you do nothing about because they do not seem important.

One of the major difficulties that people new to internet marketing have to learn to overcome is to be able to look at their website as a visitor would. Because you know your product, or know a lot about the subject of your site, the layout makes perfect sense to you, but how does it look to somebody not as conversant with the topic as you are. Have you made assumptions that others might need explained to them? Are you assuming a knowledge that is not there?

Ask a friend or relative who does not have your knowledge to run their eye over your site, and then act on any comments made. It is easy for experts to pitch a website with too high a level of assumed knowledge.

Have you tried to use your own site? Have you checked every navigation link? There is nothing better designed to prompt a visitor to navigate away from your site than a broken link. If you are that sloppy with your site, what like are your products? That is the way people think, so make sure that all your links work on a regular basis.

Want to learn more about it? Download the free ebook, Steps to Article Marketing Success.

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