The Mistakes We Don’t Bother in Web Designing
Web designing mistakes being committed by designers is a very common thing. These are even more common in aspiring designers, who in the desire to implement new ideas fall victim to such mistakes. Even experienced professional are prone to committing mistakes. So if you are a designer you have to be careful to do everything perfectly.
Here are some mistakes which are very common:
Faults in Site Structure
The area where many designers fail is offering balance between the space taken by information and white or blank space. Written material, pictures and menus should be displayed on a contrasting background and distances in the designing elements should present a neat and clean look. Overcrowded web pages are a serious put off, where visitors leave the site just because they get irritated by the cluttered up design. See the margin, “padding” style whilst making a site.
Example of clean web design:
Browser Issue
The site, when opened in different browsers, should be perfect. Many designers do not check the browser compatibility or skip this step in hurry. Web developers who rely on site templates mostly commit this mistake. Many browsers are present out there and this fact makes things difficult. So always check the compatibility of your site with the popular browsers.
Miserable Navigation
This thing can instantly annoy the visitors and force them to leave your site. This means loss of traffic! When a visitor comes to your site he/she is looking for certain information, and in case that information is hard to find (bad navigation) the visitor would leave your site. So the desired information should be maximum three clicks away. What many designers do is burying the information too deep, which makes the visitor frustrated. So always highlight the text and navigation elements properly. Using unusual names for Home, Product, About and other sections is big no no as it can confuse the visitor. Website templates can come in handy when the website is for small and medium businesses as you can develop or redesign your site with right navigational elements in place.
Using Flash and Music
Aspiring designers love using Flash and background music because it makes the site look beautiful. But the problem with flash and music is that they really slow down the response time and page loading is disturbed. Many visitors that come to the site do not have high speed Internet connection which means that they have to wait a long time for the page to load. This thing annoys the visitor as it interrupts in their smooth browsing experience and they most of the time leave the site. Website templates with flash should always be tested before developing. Users also don’t like the auto-played background music. Whilst it can be good for websites promoting music or audio guided tour, the visitor should always be provided with an option to control the sound instead of auto-playing it from the beginning.
Unlabelled Links
Unlabelled links are really frustrating for the visitors as they get confused about the destination where the link would lead. So links should always be properly labeled. You can group similar links with same color or fonts, change the color of used links, or use neat buttons to help the users. Designers are sometimes unsuccessful in distinguishing the text links within content.
Typographical Faults
Font is one of the most important thing in a website. Font should always be easily readable and understandable by the user. The size of font should not be too tiny or too big, but should be smart web safe font of optimum sizes. Using extremely fancy fonts or going overboard with when using fonts is a common mistake. Using website templates can minimize the chances of such mistakes.
Images are Not Optimized
Images used on a website should always be resized or compressed, so that the loading time is minimum. Images that take a lot of time to load should be avoided, because most of the viewers leave without waiting for the picture t load fully.A smart way to avoid this mistake is by using thumbnail view and linking them to full size pictures. Commonly used formats are JPG, PNG and GIF. Other formats of picture often take a lot of time to load. When using a picture(s) as a background, the designer should be careful about the loading time and level of optimization. Probably it can also be remove by image optimization tools that help for designer and bloggers.
Wrong Color Combination
A designer should always keep in mind what the site is actually of and the color combination should be in accordance with that. Colors used in a corporate site are different from those used in a health or fashion site. Using contrasting colors or a lot of colors is a bad idea. Most designers do not stick to the golden principle of using only three primary colors and using their shades, if necessary. Website templates with amazing color combination can be used as reference.
Poor Text Format
Most of the visitors like to glance over the content before they go into details. They do not like chunks of text. Many designers are unsuccessful when it comes to presenting content that can be easily glanced over. Using bullets, numbers, headings, sub-headings, highlighting with bold or color are some easy steps that are often neglected. Website templates can prove to be a smart reference point for creating a site. You can read and improve matching fonts and tips.
Designing a website is not an easy thing and designers should be cautious about the errors that can happen. Some errors happen unwittingly but some are also because of lack of proper knowledge. The tips mentioned above should be followed to minimize chances of mistakes.
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Y u no put Chrome icon?
<—- speaking of padding…
I think another thing that could be thrown in with Flash and music is distracting animations. Rather they’re .gif files or Flash files, they all slow down loading time. They sometimes slow down the user’s computer, and they almost always distract from the important information (the content).
One thing I always hate to see is the do-it-yourselfer who finds a way to build a web page, and first thing they do is put in an animated background image.
Great article.