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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 brand, a CD or anything
related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting background
music on to your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but
imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a
visitor browses to another page on your site, the same 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! I would prefer to have Verdana font on my site,
preferably of 10 to 12 size.
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 every time 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 conclusion, 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!
Website Customization: What can we do?
Nowadays, in this trendy world, people get very upset when they do not
look entirely presentable. This would also be the case in web
designing.
Every individual would definitely want their website to look good, if
not, to the best they can. Here are a few things we could look out for
when wanting to create a professional looking webpage.
Color Schemes and Themes.
When designing, always choose matching colors. An example of a matching
color would be to have a dark background, with visible words and
designs. With the dark theme, try not to mix too many bright colors
into the design. What we should NEVER do, is to mix two very different
colors, such as purple and yellow. Now, of course, it would depend on
the purpose of the website, but those two colors are too striking for
one who wants it to look more professional.
Themes must always suit the company or rather, the organization / etc.
If the website was made to cater for a food company, it would be wise
to stick to that particular category, rather than to revert to a
different theme, such as machinery.
Fonts should be used in regard to the formality of the website. A
simple sans-serif font would suffice in most cases. Exceptional cases
such as design and art groups might want to use fanciful designs and
fonts. Of course, that’s only if you know what you’re doing.
Finally, we must always try to think of our visitors, see the way they
see. The resolutions and file sizes of the pictures must not be too
large in terms of size. This is to allow maximum compatibility and
cater our visitor’s needs.
So, planning is something we should always do, before attempting something.
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