What Not to Wear: 7 Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

August 21, 2007

On the show What Not to Wear, style gurus Stacy London and Clinton Kelly take people from drab to fab during a one week fashion makeover in New York City.

If you think this is purely vain, then you haven’t watched the show. Most of the people who are chosen for a makeover have some internal issues they need to deal with such as self-esteem or understanding how their image affects business.

In the same way, your web site’s look affects your business. No doubt about it. Countless times, I have visited a site only to wonder if they are a legitimate company because their site is so poorly designed. It makes me feel as if they’re in it for a fraudulent, quick buck.

Your web site can dress for success by avoiding these fashion faux paus:

1. Poor Navigation Whether it’s too much or too little, poor navigation will have your visitors exiting your site faster than chocolate in my refrigerator.
2. Lack of Search Function I would be lost if I couldn’t search Target and Walmart for things like Transformers bookbags. Would I be able to find what I need on your site?
3. Bad Font Choice Did you know that senior citizens are the fastest growing demographic for internet usage? I sure hope they can read your site. Make sure the font is big enough and use a font found on most computers (Arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Georgia). Other fonts can be used in images, but limit those to logos. You don’t want all your text stored in an image where search engine spiders can’t read it.
4. Pages That are Too Busy If you stuff too much crap on one page, it’s like reading a run on sentence and who wants to read those anymore i mean who has the time seriously if a company cared about it’s customers it would take the time to make editorial decisions and organize content in a manner that is easily broken down, presented and therefore understood by the user audience is that really too much to ask, i don’t think so, but you wouldn’t know it by visiting some sites out there today it’s like hey i’m trying to concentrate on this poorly written article but there are ads and buttons and other nav stuff hopping out all over the place and i’m only 3500 words into the 115,000 word page of copy you’ve got going on, i’m tired just thinking about it, enough already, i’ve got work to do.
5. Wait for it, Wait for it Well, I don’t want to wait for your page to load any longer! 2-3 seconds, max, my friends. What? Your site loads in 15-20 seconds you say? It’s almost embarrassing as if that pesky dream about showing up naked to your high school reunion has come true.
6. Intro pages That is so 5 years ago. And it wasn’t great back then either. Vistors want to know what your site is about - immediately! Stop trying to lure people who’ve already been lured to your site.
7. Horizontal scrolling It pains me that this even occurs anymore. 1024×768 is what the majority of your users will be displaying. Design accordingly!

The key ingredient to good web design is (drum roll, please)…. BALANCE. Don’t overwhelm your visitors but help them find what they’re looking for.

Technorati Tags: web design, online custom publishing, conversation marketing

Posted in Site Planning by Nathania Johnson