Avoiding Simple Design Mistakes

Many of the world’s websites suffer from mistakes that can dramatically impact their effectiveness. The mistakes done while designing a website can be easily avoided. This article lists the some common mistakes with helpful advice on how to avoid them.
No matter how well or how poorly your site is implemented, by far the largest mistake occurs when the website’s role in the overall strategy of your organisation has not been well thought through. Only once the strategic purposes and role of the site are understood can the site be built in a manner that achieves those objectives.

1. Lack of Accessibility:

Accessibility refers to the ease with which a wide range of users can access your website. It also refers to the vast array of equipment, operating systems and browsers that are used to surf the web.

2. Infrequently Asked Questions:

Most of the websites no longer have FAQs pages and rather updated their content to provide information to the visitors. All the content of your website needs to be relevant to the visitor who are frequently visiting the site. Relevant and quality content will give them a good impression and will increase the chances of a visitor becoming a customer.

3. Can’t find contact information:

For small and medium businesses this is crucial as your contact information provides a key link to reality, giving customers confidence that they are dealing with a real business rather than a chiseler. You should provide the contact information,  including conventional methods such as phone and business address.

4. Click here To enter site:

Don’t waste your home page with a “Click here to enter site” link since your website visitor is already here, so help them immediately with relevant and quality content.

6. Too much flash:

Since not only everyone has flash but also not everyone has the bandwidth to support flash. Though flash can add movement to your website. If you have decided that it is appropriate to use a sizeable flash component on your website then make sure that the visitor receives visual feedback while it loads.

7. Too many meaningless graphics:

Excessive use of graphics will create confusion and lead to slow down the user experience. Graphics used in your website need to be optimised to ensure that the site is running at faster speeds. It will help your website to enhance the user experience.

8. Search Engine Unfriendly:

Although  having a search engine friendly site will not assure you high rankings on your favourite search engine. These include having a site map, brief and relevant content, use of standard mark-up tags that are recognised by search engines as well as meta tags such as keywords and a description.

10. Poor navigation:

Navigation from your website should be systematic and structured in a well-manner consistent web conventions. You should stick to standard techniques and locations for navigation elements such as links and menus. Navigating through your website should be perceptive. It must be easy for each visitor to find the primary links such as “Home” and “Contact us” links with simple distinguishable navigation elements.

11. Poor color schemes:

A poor colour scheme will distract visitors from your website. At worst, the message from your site will become unreadable. It is also essential to keep vision impaired users in mind, so if your site features coloured text on a coloured background then it would be wise to offer a high contrast option. This can easily be done using style sheets.

12. Expecting that people will read your Web Pages:

Many of the people skip to read the web page completely. They just look over the web pages for relevant information, zooming in on the essentials that catch their interest. So it is important that you will display the well-ordered information which is easy to locate on the page.

13. Pop-up Windows:

Try to avoid pop-up windows, unless it is essential to use in your website. Most of the visitors find pop-windows irritating and also many browsers block them.

14. Broken Links:

All the links on your website should be properly tested and work. Visitor encounter a  broken link will  look improper and lead to demoralize the visitors in your website which affects business revenue of your organization.

A flawless site will load in not more than a few seconds. As website visitors are highly impatient and will leave slow sites redirecting to another website. Reasons for slow loading pages may include heavy size graphics, optimum graphics formats.  If there is a certain, unavoidable reason for having a slow site, then provide visual feedback for the visitor while it loads. Site graphics need to be optimised to ensure that the site is displayed at a appropriate speed.