Bad Web Design Is No Joke
You finally launched your website. It’s perfect – or so you think. Now for the real test. How will your site visitors react to you shiny new site? Will they dive in or recoil in horror, never to return again?
What are some web design elements to steer clear of? Here’s a short list of what constitutes bad web design:
1. Music. Music is potentially a major turn-off because not everyone will like your choice of music.
2. Midi music. Please people. It’s 2010 already.
3. Animated Gifs. If your website contains animated “under construction” signs, waving flags, animated email gifs or anything that blinks – re-read reason #2.
4. Centered Text Centered text is the tool of amateur designers. If you are designing the site yourself, visit the web design that sucks website. By looking at bad sites you’ll learn what not to do.
5. Times New Roman and most (not all) Serif fonts. Serif fonts are hard to read on a computer. So it’s best to err on the side of caution and stick with a serif font like Verdana, Arial or Lucida Sans Unicode font.
6. Cluttered layouts are not good. Less is more. More is never more. Plus,when you add more “stuff”, it obliterates the focal point.
7. No obvious Call to Action. I mean, what do you want visitors to do?
8. No Contact information. Or its well hidden. Don’t may people hunt for ways to get in touch with you.
9. No way to contact you beyond a web form. This is particularly frustrating for clients after the sale. Especially when there are support or billing issues that need follow up from you. Being able to speak with a real person is 100% better than talking to a form.
10. Disturbing color choices. Unless you are a gamer, white text on a black background isn’t exciting or sexy. It’ll give most people a headache. Black text on a white background may be boring, but it works. Try to use a color pallette that makes sense in terms of your site visitors and design theme.
11. Complicated and confusing navigation. If it is not simple, your visitors will bolt. Are your pages named in a way that don’t make sense? Is the page so lengthy that a person has to scroll forever or frames that force users to scroll sideways? That crack is wack.
12. Your site takes forever to load. This will not only drive away traffic but now Google is factoring page load time into its indexing algorithim.
13. Only looks good in Internet Explorer. Let me just say I wish Microsoft would get out of the browser business. In the meantime, you’ll have to do you due diligence and test your site in multiple browsers. IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome and Safari for sure.
14. Is your site a Flash circus? That’s bad web design. Just quit it already.
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