William Jimenez

Bad Website Design - Avoid Them At All Cost

Avoid the mistakes of other website designers who make bad website design choices

Websites and blogs are easier than ever to setup. Gone are the days when setting-up sites can only be done by IT guys or web geeks. Using free Content Management Systems or blog platforms, everyone has an even chance to have their own online presence. However, the easy road to setting up sites does not always translate to websites with good website designs. At some point or another, you must have seen websites with bad designs. A bad website design is very easy to identify. Unconsciously, we determine a site to be ugly based on some common characteristics. This article discusses the common traits of bad website design. With this knowledge, you, as a website designer, will be fully armed to avoid these bad website design mistakes. Here are a few pointers to help you get started.

Background And Text

Dark background, incompatible color combination of background and text, or very small font size makes for very hard reading. Stay away from stylish fonts but instead use sans-serif fonts for your contents. Having the proper color mix and good font size will increase usability of your site and make a big impact on the visitors' experience.

Communication Style

It is nice to appear smart and intelligent but geek speak or highly intellectual postings will not be perceived well by your visitors. Each of your webpage should not be used for showing off your linguistic prowess or technically-laden lingo. The usual rule here is to clearly communicate with your visitors in an easy to understand, grammatically-sound, direct to the point format. Technical details should be presented in the language level of your visitors.

Graphics

Having nice large graphics is only appropriate for printed advertisement. On the Net, it is better to utilize easy-to-load graphics so webpages are loaded quickly. If your website can't serve up information swiftly and the longer your visitors become idle, the faster your visitors will leave your site never to go back.

Templates and Navigation

As much as possible, have a consistent look and feel in your website thru the use of templates. If your visitors have to re-familiarize and re-learn the headers, navigation and footers for every webpage, your visitors will eventually get tired and leave.

Pop-ups

Unless you can justify it, never use pop-ups. It is by far the single most frustrating thing your visitor encounters while surfing. When visitors close the pop-ups, they will also close your site, never to be irritated again.

As regularly creating websites for my clients, I see a lot of web designers both good and bad. More often, the bad web designers have mastered the science and art of bad and ugly website design. I'm pretty sure this article uncovers your eyes and will help you spot the difference between the two.

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