There are mistakes that are often made during the design of websites. While designing websites, it is important to learn from the mistakes of the past. Here are just a few tips we have learnt from mistakes made with our own designs and those of others.
- Lack of strategy and plan for the website: Web designers do not often have a strategy built in their project planning. The project plan should vividly explain the purpose of the website being designed and should have a defined target audience for who the website is meant for. By defining the users and viability of your website for those users can together create a better approach to a meaningful design.
- Complex designs: Lack of usability often shows up in the design of some websites. There are many designers that get into complex web designs, which prevent the visitors or users to comprehend the content of the website. The design you put in, along with the content navigation, should be able to guide your visitors or users to find what they are looking for. Complex designs would mean that they would just leave your site never to return again.
- Design and the theme contradict: At times we find contradictions between the design and the theme of the website. These contradictions put off the visitors or users, and with this you lose whatever purpose the website has been designed for. For example, a website for a law firm should not have flashy design which does not in any way deliver the brand identity to your visitors.
- Deficiency of SEO in design: Search Engine Optimization is one of the most important design aspects that need to be considered in web design. It is the biggest traffic source builder in any website design, and has paramount importance in a good website design.
- Non-interactive designs: To make your website as user friendly as possible it is necessary to design interactive features in your website. If you are designing an e-commerce site, the interactive features help your visitors to easily find what they are looking for, and this helps the visitors become your customers. Your visitors should feel at-ease when going through the different pages, and they should have a feeling that they are choosing what to do on your website not that they are being forced.
- Use of high scrolling pages: Web designers often over-look the fact that visitors to a website do not like large page sizes in which they have to scroll on and on to look at the contents. Mostly over size web pages would consist of stale texts, which tire out the visitors and compel them to leave the site. A good website would have a simple normal page layout maintaining a single concept appearing in all the pages.
- Increased number of clicks: The designer should take into account that the visitors do not like to click too many times in order to go through the content of your website. The number of clicks required for a visitor to travel through your web pages should be kept at a minimum so that it is easier for the visitors to comfortably find out what they are looking for.
As you can see these design errors can easily be overlooked. Review your site design and make sure it doesn’t contain any of these errors and you should have a user friendly and useful site.
