|
Web Design Articles
How to Avoid the 12 Common Web Design Mistakes
Copyright 2002 Herman Drost
Are people visiting your web site but not buying? This may be a sign and the
time to do some redesign of your web site. Often you are so close to what you
have created, that you can’t see obvious design mistakes. I often do the same
when writing an article – everything looks fine when I have finished, yet when
I review it the next day and I’m amazed at how many mistakes I have made.
Let’s look at some of the most common Web Design mistakes:
1. Sloppy Web Site Copy – your heading and first paragraph should clearly
indicate the purpose of your web site. “Content is King” on the Net, so make
sure there is plenty of focused information for your visitors. The content
should draw the visitor through the site to take action in the end. Include
contact information on every page in case people have questions.
2. Bad Color Coordination – avoid using dark text on a dark background. Use
dark text on a light background, such as black on white. Use colors that blend
well together – observe nature or look at paintings to get some idea of good
color combinations.
3. Pages Load Too Slowly – using too many images or inserting large images on
a web page, slow down the loading time of your web page. Optimize your images
(reduce their size) before you insert them on your site, otherwise your visitors
will leave before your site is loaded.
4. Poor Navigation – this means visitors can’t easily find the information.
They experience broken links, error pages or discover too many moving objects
(animations, flash, scrolling text, marquees) – all these will annoy the
visitor and cause him to click elsewhere. Keep your navigation simple by
creating clear links on all web pages. Subscribe FREE to Marketing Tips
Newsletter
Receive your FREE trial download of this ebook for subscribing:
Name
Email
How Much Hosting Space Do You Need?
Hosting from $30/year
5. Orphan Pages – these are pages other than your homepage, where the visitor
has no idea how it fits in with the overall structure of your web site. You
should always have a link to the homepage, so visitors know where they are on
your web site.
6. Long Scrolling – the visitor has to scroll horizontally, or many pages
vertically to view the whole web page. Create the width of your web page to fit
on one screen, to avoid horizontal scrolling and have a maximum of 3 pages to be
scrolled vertically.
7. Meta Tags Missing – without optimizing your web page with a description or
keywords, people can’t find you on the search engines. Research key words or
phrases relevant to your site content. Include them in your title, description
and Web Site copy.
8. Lack of Marketing Strategy – a beautiful lawn without sun or water will
soon die. A Web Site without visitors will soon die also. They are the life
blood for your website. Create numerous marketing strategies to attract visitors
to your web site – you never know which one will be the most effective.
9. Poor Layout and Design – create an aesthetically pleasing design to keep
the visitors on your site. Create enough white space between your text and
images by using margins. Don’t overlap text and images and avoid capitalizing
all text – it gives the impression you are shouting at your visitors. Use font
type such as Arial or Verdana to make it easier to read on your computer screen.
10. Avoid Using Frames – frames don’t allow you to bookmark the page or
return to it and sometimes the URLS stop working.
11. No Cross Browser Compatibility – you may be losing many customers if your
Web Site is not compatible to the browsers most people are using. Internet
Explorer (IE 4, 5, 6) is currently the dominant browser, and most users are
displaying 800x600 pixels or more, with a color depth of at least 65K colors.
(http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)
.
Therefore check your design with these statistics in mind.
12. Outdated Information – your web site is like a garden. If you allow weeds
to block out the sun and take over your garden, it will be destroyed. Attracting
and keeping web site visitors, means continually adding new information (i.e.
latest news), deleting irrelevant, outdated information and removing broken
links.
Continuous maintenance of your web site is crucial to attracting and retaining
visitors. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, hire a Web Gardener (Web
Designer), to keep your site looking fresh, clean and fast loading.
*********************************************************************
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com
Affordable Web Site Design and Low
Cost Web Hosting
Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original
articles. subscribe@isitebuild.com.
You can read more
of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles
***********************************************************************
Article reproduced with Kind Permission from Herman Drost
|
|
