Websites are one of the biggest promotional and sales tools in business. Too often people do not put enough thought into their purpose and function, resulting in a poor website. A bad website can send away customers in droves, while a high quality website design will do the opposite. How do you know if you have created a good or bad site? Well, take a minute to see if you committed some of the worst mistakes that website designers can make.
Design a Site Strictly for You.
Your website should be designed for the convenience of your visitors, not yourself. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what they want to know. Usually, visitors come to a site because they want information, to make a purchase or donation, to be entertained. Decide which of these is the purpose of your site and design your site with this principle in mind. As you do this, remember that content is always more important that design. Visitors will forgive a poorly designed site, but they will never forget a site with poor content-and thus never return.
Forget that Your Visitors are Different from You.
You would not expect your visitors to drive the exact same car or be the same height, so do not expect them to be using the same computer. With each computer difference, comes a different web browser, monitor, operating system, etc. Take the time to explore how your site looks and works in different systems rather than assuming that it will always look the same no matter what.
Currently, Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser. Firefox, however, is close behind. Further behind these are Safari, Konqueror, Gecko, Netscape, and America Online. If nothing else, make sure that your website looks good in Explorer and Firefox. Not all browsers recognize HTML codes the same way and the differences can be surprising. Before your site is finished, make sure that you test it in other browsers and using other display resolutions. This is not hard to do and, best of all, web browsers are free to download.
When it comes to monitors and display resolution, the choices are slightly slimmer. The most common size display resolution is 1024×768, but only half of users use this size. Approximately ¼ have a higher and ¼ have a lower display resolution.
Be Controlling.
This issue has to do with music, video, or some type of animation that automatically begins playing on your website. Not only is this obnoxious, but it is also annoying. If you feel the music or video adds something to your site, then place it with a player that prompts the user to play it.
Text size is another thing that visitors should be able to control. If you do not know how to use relative text sizing, learn. Instead of specifying a specific pixel size for your fonts, you specify what size the font should be (normal, smaller, or larger).
Make Users Scroll from Left to Right.
This issue goes back to understanding your visitors. Most people set their display resolution at 1024×768. If you design a webpage that does not automatically resize, this page will be too large to fit in their window causing them to have to scroll from left to right to read the text. This can be quite annoying. For best results, make sure you have a “liquid layout,” which adjusts in size based on the browser’s window. This will not only prevent left and right scrolling, but also ensure that visitors with larger monitors or higher resolution are not forced to look at a lot of white space.
