As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your
visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most
important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had
the greatest product in the whole world -- if your website is poorly
done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors
will be driven off your website by the lousy design.
When I'm talking about a "good design", I'm not only talking about 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 of course the most straightforward, which is
graphic design.
Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I've
come across. 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 first, 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 turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, 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 purely graphics -- user
accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on
your site to be legible and reasonably 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
won't be selling anything!
3) Popup windows
Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements 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 through my
popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many 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 appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses
its function immediately!
In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your
job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do
effectively. Don't let some minor mistakes stop your site from
functioning optimally!
--
Regards,
Jeyasithar R
(www.CO5.in)
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