chaze

http://www.dwhs.net/blog/2011/04/10-...ing-a-website/

We all know that design is the first thing to attract the users to a site. Depending on the success of the design, the other parts can work for sure. Whether it is your ecommerce site to showcase and sell the products or a site through which you provide various services, the design has to leave a mark in the mind of the users.

So when making your website keep in mind a couple mishaps that can detour your visitors. Here are the top ten website building mistakes we see most commonly.

1. Browser compatibility: The first and vital mistake that may have a deep impact is the compatibility of the design in several browsers. It is found that either for the lack of experience of the designers or for your hurry the designs are not made compatible to all the popular browsers. Mainly the “Internet Explorer”, one of the most used browsers, creates design break issues. So whatever hurry you are having, do not forget to make design of a webpage browser compatible. Otherwise, users will have a bad impression for your website; being irritated, they may not return again.

2. Splash page: Try to avoid in having a splash page (introductory page) for your website. Remember whatever beautiful the ‘intro’ is, those take time and visitors have less time in their hands (just 30 seconds in general). They may not push the “skip” button and enter your site to see more relevant information! So concentrate or let the designers put effort on the design of the home page.

3. The color: In whatever structure a webpage is designed, it has to have the sober color in use. Otherwise, the highly glossy or the gloomy colors may irritate the viewers. Do not try to force your personal taste of colors on the site; better try to go by the purpose of the site. In other words, there are some specific match of colors according to the convention of the designs; say the ‘sky blue’ for corporate, ‘red’ for medical purposes, the multi colors for fashion business etc. The color depth and glossiness should not poke eyes.

4. Animations and JavaScripts: For making a site interactive designers tend to use the animations. The animations may be of Flash, javascripts, 3D and etc. But remember these the excess use of things should not become bar against the overall performance of the site. Many a times JavaScripts are blocked by several browsers while flash players may not be present in user’s machines; even larger 3D and Flash files take time to load and users see the blank pages! These create bad impression in visitors mind.

5. Missing contact info & irritating forms: It is very much necessary that the websites prominently put the contact information in proper places. The visitors do not have so much time to find out the contact info; rather they should find it prominent in front of their eyes. Whereas sometimes the contact forms are long and do not work properly and users feel bored to fill them up. So it is necessary that you check out that the contact information is well displayed and several forms are well designed and not long for sure.

6. Irritating Advertisements: It is evident that the advertisements are needed for sure in a webpage. They bring revenue for the owners of the sites. But does it mean that ads have to irritate the viewers with their wrong placements? Sometimes in the layout structures the ads are misplaced among the valuable information or they are paneled in a way that viewers feel irritated. So try to instruct the designers or understand that proper placements of the ads and relevancy with the page information are a must.

7. Navigation and link : It is more than necessary that the page navigation menus are nicely designed and the links are properly clear to the visitors. Many a time it is found that designers forget to design the navigation menus properly or use the lengthy dropdowns. On the other hand, the links are designed as images (not texts) which create problem for search robots in crawling your links. Even when there are some links in the body texts the colors of those does not change on clicking for helping the visitors understand the visited links. These mistakes somehow may mislead the visitors. Try to avoid these.

8. Frames and scrollers and fixed width: Sometimes just for the enhancements of the design the frames are used or for fixed width horizontal scroll bar appear on the user machines. Do you think the users have time to scroll horizontally to know your hidden information? No, many a time they avoid these things. So try to convert your fixed width layouts into liquid layouts (100% to fit all the windows) and do not use frames.

9. Fonts and text format : Most of the times it is found that the designers do care to use light weight images and graphics but do not care the font size, type and text formats. Due to fixed font size or type the viewers feel uneasy to read the information. At the same time there should not be the use of any font family that is not commonly available in user computers. Tyr to always keep the Ariel, Verdana, Tahoma as default. Again you should look into the paragraph format of the texts. The text should not be in long paragraphs. The bulleted texts and small paragraphs help users understand your business motto.

10. Pop-ups and new windows : Last but not the least is the unnecessary use of the pop-up and opening of the new windows for explanation purposes. Generally in many cases the pop-ups are blocked in user machines and when users are provided with new windows, they either tend to see those or forget coming to the main pages. So your designs have to use “page refresh” on the same window the users have landed.

Just posted this today, hope you like it.

Cheers,

Charles

SpotOnTechSupport

As a web designer/coder, I'd like to add to this list:
Colors: Earthy tones are the most eye-friendly.
Flash: Worthless. If you have a large mobile crowd, at least have a detection script running with a non-flash area just for mobile users. It's annoying to have to download a huge .swf just because your coder can't be bothered to code a proper CSS nav area. I usually hit this with adblock.
Coding: PHP/MySQL/CSS are your friend. Very dynamic and it keeps things low on the client end since PHP is server based.
Splash pages: make it an automatic re-direct to the home page quickly. If I have to wait more than 5 seconds, I've already closed that tab and moved on.
Embedded music: Get out of the 90's. Embed an mp3 player on the page so the user can choose to listen or not listen. Don't force it on them. That's another thing that gets closed quickly by me.
Great list and rules to live by!

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chaze

I agree 110% on all of these!

ez12

Love the title of this blog :D

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