List of 7 Items To Avoid With Custom Web Design

There are plenty of gaffes that one can include unwittingly on their website and this is what would hurt your business most. Check out what the seven top mistakes of designing could be and try to avoid them as mush as possible.

1. Too loud fonts – the home page is your business' face. You definitely would not want it to hurt the eyes of the visitor. If the fonts are too large, too colorful, too much highlighted or with special effects, you would literally chase your visitor away as he/she would get a headache just looking at it, forget about reading it.

2. Too small fonts – first of all do not cram information on the home page. Rather divide it over a number of pages and put the navigation menu on a horizontal (or vertical) bar on the page for easy access. Nobody likes to squint or resize the browser window to read what you have posted. They would rather move away to a more eye-friendly website.

3. Searchability – it takes time and exceptional skills to perfect the designing of a website. In the meantime, let us assume that there are navigational problems which could lead your visitor away. The best you could do to avoid this problem is include a search (simple) bar whereby the visitor can key in what he/she wants and have it brought up for him/ her. Bad or no searchability would mean chasing away your visitors.

4. Unannounced PDF files – one of the most annoying things you would find in websites is the automatic launch of a PDF file which would have your browser frozen until the file is open. Most people, out of irritation, would just get out of the website. If you have to put a PDF file, let the visitor decide whether and when they want to read it - give a link so they are warned or have a pop-up asking their permission to launch it.

5. Readability – are you aware of the fact that people on the Net do not read the material they search? They actually scan it. Hence, writing for Net requires special formatting style such as – five-lines paragraphs, bullet heads, sub-heads, plain English (or whatever language you use), inverted pyramid style of posing information, very subtle (or no) advertising/ marketing in the text/ content. Continuous text is very painful to read on the screen – and most people would skip it.

6. Low Engine Searchability – your website's visibility and your business existence depends on how well the search engines find and read your website. If your pages do not have their titles html-ed with tags that indicate their use, you would loose a great opportunity to be indexed correctly. Hence, your home page should not read 'Welcome to xyz.com' unless you want to be indexed as 'welcome'. It should read 'xyz welcomes you'. This also serves as a label when your website has been bookmarked in the visitor's browser.

7. Advertising-type text – Internet surfers suffer from advertising blindness. In other words, if anything looks like an advertisement, they would tend to ignore it. Hence, do not put any important contents or information in what looks like a banner or advertisement text.

 

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