As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It does not matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When I am talking about a "good design" or how to build a website, I am not only talking about a good graphical design. A professional website 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.
Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst website designs I have come across. I hope that you will be able to compare that against your own website as a checklist and if anything on your website fits the criteria, you should know it is high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
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 website. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big web site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I would just turn off my speakers or leave your website. Moreover, they just add to the visitor’s burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your website, as how it is meant to be viewed.
2) Extra large/small text size on your website
As I said, there is more to web 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 is illegible you will not be selling anything!
3) Popup windows on a web site
Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like 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, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it is meant to do effectively. Do not let some minor mistakes stop your website from functioning optimally!
To all newbie’s and expert who are looking for a quick and easy how to build a web site free up your time and give you first website take a look at this site.
No comments:
Post a Comment