Website Design, avoiding common mistakes

By Michael O'Sullivan

Its often difficult for people to separate out personal preferences from what works on the Internet.  If you have a site all about cats it can have the best information available on the Internet, however, if you have 60 pictures of the worlds cats on your home page and it takes forever to download, it will rarely be read.

Pictures can bring a web site to life, its true.  However, were you aware that lots of pictures on web sites take up far more room that they should because the files are too big?  In addition web sites don't display high definition pictures so going for high quality for display on your web site may well be a waste of effort.

One of my pet hates is going to a web site and suddenly finding that I have to fight my way, literally, past several pop-ups of increasing urgency before I manage to get to the information I was actually looking for.

OK, pop-ups might work, for example if you use them to provide tips for people coming to your site, or to announce new content.  However, too many otherwise excellent sites put people off by using pop-ups to try and force a hard sell message.  Personally, I don't buy from people who annoy me!

You may have read that pop-ups increase sales, I have my doubts. That may have been the case before they began to overload the Internet experience. These days anyone can add pop-ups to their sites by downloading some free software or utility, please avoid the temptation!

Many web designers, especially newbie's have fixed ideas about how web sites should look and go totally overboard with their design in one way or another. Web designers too often forget that their finished website should be both functional and send a strong message to the visitor that reflects the website theme and not the programmer’s skill level.

Ask yourself a hard question, is your web site putting people off?

We've discussed download time and pop-ups above.  The following are other common mistakes that people make when building web sites:

• Background music: Are you operating a site selling music?  Is your site an internet radio station? If not why play background music?  Its likely that – Unless you are operating an online internet radio station or sell music CDs, why play a music file in the background continuously on every page?
• Videos: Give people a choice!  If you have to have a video that's great, however its much more acceptable to have a link that clearly tells people that if they want to see your video that they have to opt in.  I've lost count of the number of sites that I've visited where I had to turn the video off before i could browse the site.  Its a poor start to force people to watch your video.
• Font mania: you don't need loads of different font types and sizes, highlighted in green, yellow etc.  Its annoying.  If you have lots of content break it up.  Trying too hard is a mistake and makes the site look amateurish.  Some really badly designed sites are very successful, ok, but they are exceptions to the rule.
• Backgrounds: Ever been to a web site where you have trouble reading or seeing something clearly because its hard to see against the background? Enough said.

Each of us will have our own pet dislikes, however I suspect that the majority of you will be reading this with a since of deja vue or a wry smile on your lips! 

What is the point of going to the trouble of having a web site built and then putting off your potential visitors?

You may even feel like sending this article to someone you know?

About the Author:
Michael O'Sullivan is the web site developer for www.netskiver.com - this article can be reproduced subject to not being changed in anyway including the full about the author message