“If you build it they
will come!” Really??? What should you do? 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 have 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. It's not IF we make mistakes within our design, it's NOT making the same ones over and over again and learning from what we did wrong.
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 design errors I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to
compare these 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! Make the changes even if you are “in love”
with the work you have done.
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 every time a visitor browses to another
page on your site, the background music starts playing again, and again! If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my
speakers or leave your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitor’s burden
when viewing your site -- users still 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 every time 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 the “webmaster” of your site, 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!
QUOTE TO CONSIDER
THOUGHTFUL GEM
"Why do we not have the time to do things right,
but we can find the time to correct our mistakes
by doing things over?"
No comments:
Post a Comment