The Most Common Web Design Mistakes
At South West SEO, we believe that unless your website is usable
, people will simply not visit it. A pretty website can hold the interest of a user for only so long before they leave to look for the information they need elsewhere. As well as comprehensive information architecture services, Good designers will look at every aspect of a design to insure that it is as usable as possible. To that end, we consider the following when developing your site:
Fonts
Bad websites start with bad fonts. If the font is too small to read easily, or the contrast between font colour and background colour too low or too high, users (which, for the business owner, equate to customers) will simply leave the site in frustration for one that has the information they need in a clearer typeface. Designers strive to find the kind of match between outstanding design and intelligent usability that the user will be looking for.
Content
Writing content for the web is a lot different to writing marketing brochures or advertising. The average user will only stay on a website for 1 minute 49 seconds, so we cannot assume that we will hold a user?s interest for long enough to be able to insert lots of marketing languages and unnecessary sales pitches.
Content on the web should be short, to the point and easily readable for users with limited time to spare. It should aim to answer questions the user would logically be expected to have, and use the same descriptive words and phrases a user might: rather than coin a phrase such as "thirty-four inch diametric mobile carry-all", consider that most users will be searching for "Sturdy bag for travelling".
Web users are extremely focused on clear, predefined objectives: they have something they definitely want to accomplish and they seek to do it before focusing their attentions on anything else. If the answer to their questions is not on the page, or they cannot find a price or contact number, they will leave the site. It is not enough to simply put the information on the page and bury it underneath slick talk and advertising slogans, because the average user will only spend one minute forty-nine seconds on your website anyway, and won?t spend the time necessary to dig around and find the information they need.
Broken Browsers
A majority of internet users browse using Microsoft?s popular Internet Explorer browser, but due to a number of security flaws, other browsers like Mozilla Firefox are becoming increasingly popular. However, Internet Explorer and Mozilla browsers use two very different rendering engines, which means extra work to achieve what is known as ?cross-browser compatibility?. Some might say that the market share for minority browsers is too low to consider when developing, but in actual fact around 120 million users worldwide use alternative browsers - can you afford to alienate that many prospective clients?
Bells and Whistles
Tempting as it is to fill sites with lots of moving images, friendly music and use Macromedia?s popular Flash technology to create a beautiful, complex navigation, the fact of the matter is that users often find such practises annoying and impractical. While a design must inspire confidence in a user, simply creating a technical demonstration of every jazzy technique in the world is neither useful nor clever: it is likely to turn away more customers than it brings in. Designers understand the need to embrace emerging technologies, whilst insuring that we are choosing the correct media for your site.
Consistency
Logic dictates that only a tiny minority of the half billion worldwide internet users will ever visit your site. Unless you are very fortunate indeed, all those who do visit your site will spend the majority of their time on the internet using other people?s websites, which unfortunately means your website will be chasing the pack, rather than leading it.
With that in mind, it is a useful exercise when designing to consider exactly what other websites are doing, and what a user will expect to see on our website because of it. For instance, a great majority of websites use the typical blue coloured underlined text for links, which means users expect a visual indicator of what is clickable.
Search
With the consistent popularity of the ?GYM? (Google, Yahoo! and - most recently - MSN) search engines, it has become apparent that users have very precise expectations of what a search function should do: at a very basic level, it should feature a box in which they can type words, a button to perform the search with and a list of prioritised results in order of relevancy that appear on a new search engine results page (SERP). In short, they expect the mannerisms of the search to resemble those of the three most popular engines that they use on a daily basis: exposure to these sites every single day means that, again, chasing the pack rather than attempting to oust them is the best solution.
User-centric Design
When building websites designers will often evaluate a design against what are established to be the five user goals when visiting (for instance, for British Airways it might be ?Book plane ticket?, for Microsoft it might be ?technical support?). This allows us to avoid scope-creep in our designs: we are deliberately coming back to the original idea of the site and making sure that we achieve the goal. Rather than producing sites that perform ten different functions to an average degree, we aim to choose a handful of primary goals for each site and concentrate on them as our priority.
We understand that the only person using the website with any sort of influence is the user: it doesn?t matter what we think of a site or how easy we find it to use, only the end user?s opinion matters. As the end-user is more often than also your customer.
User Input
We understand how frustrating it is when you are asked to sign up for a website and you have to put in your dog?s mother?s maiden name, your national insurance number and your best friend?s hair colour, but we also understand that you need to have as much information from an enquiry as possible to ensure you can respond in an adequate fashion. Most of this information is unnecessary and only creates frustration among your users. We understand that simplifying and reducing the amount of information a user is required to give, whilst not compromising your obligation to quality service. This way, users (and - again - therefore, customers) are more likely to contact you and will be in a better mood when doing so. Also, you?ll have less information to plough through when responding.
These are by no means the only mistakes web designers make, but are certainly amongst the most common - and frustrating for your potential customers.
For more information on web design and SEO please Visit the South West SEO blog
by: nelson.
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