Avoid These Website Design Elements
As a website designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest simplicity 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 of poor design you won't be able to sell even one copy of it.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.
Therefore, following are some features of the worst web designs I've come across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own website as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take serious action and fix it!
1) Background audio
Unless you are running a website 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 worst, 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 load your website.
2) Extra large or small text size
There is more to website 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 exhibit advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just nuke them on instinct everytime one manages to infiltrate my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like so 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, as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it's supposed to do effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your website from functioning optimistically!
