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Web Design Elements You Should Avoid Having On Your Site

Posted on 28. Apr, 2011 by Faye Bond in Blog, Bond Global Enterprises, Website Design

Web Design Elements You Should Avoid Having on Your Site

As a web designer, your website’s design should allow your visitors to navigate the site easily, to give the good impression and most important of all a clear call to action. It doesn’t matter a hoot if you have the best product or service in the whole world – if your website is poorly designed and includes elements that really annoy visitors you won’t sell anything.

When I’m talking about a “good design”, I’m taking about what a visitor sees in the first 10-20 seconds on arriving at your website. That first impression when they decide to leave or stay. 

#1 Background looping music and audio

Unless you are running a site which promotes anything related to music, I would strongly advise you to stay away from putting looping background music and audio onto your website. 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 background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d leave your site.

The more music and audio that is on your site the slower the load time leaving visitors waiting for the site to load. They then do one thing and that is click the “back” button.

#2 Extra large/small text size

You should design the font type and text size 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!

There are several fonts that are web suitable. These are Arial, Times New Roman, Lucida and Tahoma. The text size can be either 11 or 12 for your content. Headings are of course in large text size.

#3 Popup windows

Popup windows have been used to the point that many Internet users, including myself, do not pay any attention to them other than close them down the instant they are seen. They are so ‘in-your-face’ that most of us find them very offensive and intrusive. 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 and credibility immediately!

#4 Dark Backgrounds

This is one of my pet hates – dark backgrounds. From early childhood and for many years human beings have read things that are on light colored backgrounds. Though research it has been found that a reader will read more, absorb more and act more if they are reading text that is on white paper.

With the advent of the Internet the term “white space” is used a lot in website design. The human eye needs white/light backgrounds to be able to find what they are looking for on a website. Therefore having white space is a vital element in good web design

As a web designer my job is to make sure your website does what it’s meant to do effectively. Don’t let common design mistakes stop your site from functioning effectively.
 

Faye Bond

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Tags: call to action, design, fonts, Internet, visitors, website, Website Design

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