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Top 10 Deadly Web Site Design Mistakes
What should you do to develop a "good" site? Well, it's probably easier to tell you what you should not do. In this article, I'll discuss basic web site design mistakes.
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You need three things to succeed on the Internet:
A winning product or service
Traffic
A web site that sells
If you don't have a good product or service that people want, don't waste your time on anything else. Go develop or look for one.
Traffic is the key. No traffic, no sales. You should spend at least 80% of your time on promotion once your online business is up and running.
On the other hand, you can spend every waking moment promoting your site, but if it's not a well designed site to begin with, you're fighting a losing battle.
What should you do to develop a "good" site then? Well, it's probably easier to tell you what you should not do. In this article, I'll discuss basic web site design mistakes, not sales copy writing, not credibility building, but basic flaws in the planning and execution of the site itself.
These top 10 web site design mistakes can easily kill your online business yet we see them everywhere on the Internet. No wonder 95% of online businesses are not making any profits! Want to make yours in the top 5%? By all means avoid these:
Web Site Design Mistakes #1: Taking Forever To Download
You land on a site, and wait for minutes for the site to fully load. You see pieces of graphics appearing here and there. Or worse, you stare at a blank screen wondering what's happening. Finally, 2 minutes later, the whole page and each of the graphics is downloaded.
My question is, are you really still there 2 minutes later?
You may have a site that provides the best content and the most beautiful graphics in the world, but if it takes forever to download no one will hang around long enough to view it. The longer it takes your site to download, the fewer visitors will ever view it.
You can see this mistake everywhere, especially at big corporate sites made by graphic designers from larger web site design companies that have high-speed connections to the Internet. These designers create wonderfully complex, large graphics or flash movies, and naturally desire to show them off. The whole thing looks great on their high-speed system, but for a home or office with a 56K dial-up modem - where your end users are - the graphics may take forever to download.
When visitors hit your site, they're looking for information, services, or products. For the most part, they are not interested in your new graphics at all. It's tempting to present a cool stunning graphic or flash movie to your visitors. But if they can't see it within 10 seconds, you are out. Your competitors are just a click away. There's simply no reason why any surfer is dying for any particular web site, including yours.
You have to carefully balance between image and download time. There is a happy medium where the site looks great and the file is small enough to download fairly quickly.
As a general rule, make the total graphics and text load for any single web page no more than 50K, preferably less. Even if you have no choice but to make your site a big flash movie, it is possible to start playing within 3 seconds - if your designers know how to do it right.
Keep in mind, don't just add something because it looks cool. It must serve an important purpose or it should be deleted.
Web Site Design Mistakes #2: Hide Your Product Or Service Deep Inside
Have you ever been to sites where you would see something like this: "ReallyCool company was formed in 1998. Our state-of-art technology helps our customers achieve higher productivity and better quality at easily affordable cost. With our one-stop solution, any business can..."
Sounds good and standard. But after reading all these nonsense, you are still wondering what the hell the company does?
You'd be amazed at the number of sites that don't tell you exactly right at the beginning what kind of business they're in. You look at the home page and maybe scan an "About Us" page, end up with a mission statement telling you nothing useful.
Don't make your visitors search for your products or services. Just tell them plainly right at the top of home page. If your visitors have to figure out what products or services you offer, the chances are, they won't.
Visitors can not care less about your company history, board of directors, your business philosophy... What we want to know is, what's in it for me? What can you do for me? Tell me straight, as soon as possible, in simple words.
Web Site Design Mistakes #3: Wrong Color Scheme
There is nothing more frustrating than going to a site that you feel will be exactly what you're looking for, only to find that the information is unreadable due to poor background and text color choices.
For any business site, white or off-white is usually the best background for text readability and to make graphics pop out. Keep it simple and traditional here: black on white. Simpler is better for both readability as well as download time.
Designers sometimes reverse colors, using dark backgrounds with light letters. While dramatic, light on dark is harder to read. If you do choose to stray from black on white, make sure that there is enough contrast between your text and background colors so that your visitors will not have trouble reading your content.
And don't make your site too colorful. Choose 2 or 3 colors that match your logo or graphics and stick to the same color scheme on every page.
Web Site Design Mistakes #4: Frames
Netscape 2.0 introduced frames, and soon frames were the rage. Now most careful designers avoid them in nearly all circumstances.
In theory, they sound like a great tool while in practice, they are usually confusing at the best and harmful sometimes. Yes, frames could provide a very convenient navigation system for a site, but most of the time they don't.
Frames tend to cut up the screen into windows that require excessive scrolling to read the text.
Frames that require ugly gray scroll-bars, look, well ... ugly.
Frames do not always print out correctly on some browsers.
Frames cannot be bookmarked easily.
The worst thing is, search engine spiders don't like frames either.
Use frames only if you know what you are doing.
Web Site Design Mistakes #5: Inconsistent Layout
On a business site, the design, layout, navigation system, look and feel, should be kept consistent throughout the whole site.
Have you ever visited a site and clicked a link and then wondered if you were still at the same site or if you had moved on to a different one?
I would recommend using the same layout, color scheme and navigation system (in the same location too) on every page throughout the site.
It may sound boring, but it should make it much easier for your visitors to find their way around.
Web Site Design Mistakes #6: Blinking Text Or Animated Images
I used to love them. They look interesting sometimes. I've to resist the temptation to put a lovely animated gif from time to time. I mean, some of them are pretty cool, but you have to dump them.
Believe me, those flashing stuffs hurt your business and people just don't like them.
Think about it. There is nothing more distracting than trying to read material and having that incessant blinking going on. You don't want to look, but your eyes keep getting drawn to the horrible spectacle.
Don't get me wrong, it's OK to sprinkle a few good animations here and there throughout your site. You run into problems when you've got 10 or so animated images on one page.
In fact, the only place I think is appropriate for a blinking text is where you attract visitors to click and go to your order page. That's the purpose of your web site, isn't it?
The same applies to those small floating ads. Just when you start to concentrate, they jump out and shout at you "Look at me! Look at me!"
Web Site Design Mistakes #7: Poor Navigation System
I've come across many sites not knowing where to go to find out the information I need. This pain may come from too many choices - or too few.
Sometimes site structure is more related to a business's internal organization than it is to fulfilling customer needs. Instead of asking, "How can I present all the information I want to?" ask "What does my average customer want to know when she first comes to my site?" Navigation should be designed from the customer's perspective.
If the average visitor comes to shop, don't hide the entrance to your store. If she comes for technical information, make your FAQ and knowledge base easily accessible.
Provide clear ways to navigate your site on every page. Keep the navigation system consistent throughout the whole web site. Put navigation menus on top and on the left side. Provide a link back to home page on every page in case visitors get lost somewhere.
You'd better get navigation system right before starting coding any page. It's frustrating to realize that you have to update navigation links on every page after the whole web site is done, especially if you have a large site.
Web Site Design Mistakes #8: Background Music
This is simply annoying. It hurts your professional image.
Background music is more appropriate for a personal site, don't you think so? It's important that you present a professional image for your business site.
If you feel absolutely necessary to make your visitors take this unusual punishment, please don't make it loop indefinitely.
If you are selling music CDs, ask your visitors to press the play button to listen to a sample clip.
Web Site Design Mistakes #9: Best Viewed By IE5 Or Above
You've seen that. "This site is best viewed with Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 5 and above. Click the logos to download."
Are you paid to be advertiser of Microsoft and Netscape or what?
Most webmasters doing this may argue "This is for those who may not be able to view our site properly".
But this is your fault, not your visitors'. If your site really cannot be viewed with IE4, redesign it instead of troubling your potential customers to install 20MB application just to view your site. No one will unless your site is extremely important to them. You are not Yahoo, why do you think anyone would do that for you?
The truth is, few people are still using anything prior than IE5. Your "Best Viewed With..." statement well indicates your unawareness of the latest situation on the Internet. Nothing else.
Another mistake goes hand in hand with this - "Best Viewed Under 800x600 Resolution."
Most designers work in front of a 19-inch or larger monitor to make life easier. They configure their monitors to at least 800x600 resolution and are as happy as clams. But some of the average users, not a lot though, still run 640x480.
Again, it's your job to make sure your site works under any resolution with any browser.
Web Site Design Mistakes #10: Hit Counter
To be honest, I can't understand why so many web sites have hit counters at the bottom. Even some corporate sites are doing that. Just because your hosting service company provides a free counter script?
It will not do any good to your business if your counter tells a visitor she's 26th guest since 2001. Sure you can preset the counter to start from any number, say 1,000,000. Nobody will believe that. And the fact is, nobody cares.
Go to Yahoo, or Amazon, or any well established online business, I bet $100 you can never find a counter there.
By showing that little green box, your web site will look amateur, at the best.
Ok, I hope this article is of help to you. But I've to include a small note here. If you are a die hard advocate of some of these techniques, please don't take offense. These are only my opinions. Most experienced web developers and marketers will agree with me though.
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