As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the biggest ease of use, the finest impression and most crucial of all a welcoming feel. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole universe — if your website is badly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven away your website by the lousy design.
When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m not only talking of a good graphical design. A professional web 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 naturally the most straightforward, which is graphic design.
Hence, I have highlighted some characteristics of the worst web designs I’ve encounter. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to take serious action!
1) Background music
Unless you are running a site 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 site. It might sound pleasant to you at the start, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just switch off my speakers or leave your site. Furthermore, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site — users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.
2) Extra large/small text size
As I said, there is more to web design than strictly graphics — user accessibility is one large part of it as well! You should design the text on your site to be legible and moderately 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’s illegible you will not be selling anything!
3) Popup windows
Popup windows are so blatantly used to display ads that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass over my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like a lot 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 comes out on a visitor’s screen. Your website misses its function instantly!
In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make certain your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let some small slips stop your site from operating optimally!
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