Things to Avoid in an Effective Web Design
An effective web design is one that is simplified as much as possible without minimizing its feasibility and comfort level. The website must be able to be concise and clear enough in delivering its main content. Users must be able to navigate around the website easily without any problems. The one big mistake web designers often made is to create a website that is from their own point of view and neglecting users comfort and the user-friendliness of the website.
Some of the factors that will devalue a website are:
1. Slow loading pages
2. Poorly written contents
3. Too much frills in the website designs
4. Difficult navigational menus
5. Not cross-browser friendly
Let us go through each one of them to see why these factors are so damaging to the overall website design.
First off, slow loading pages can be the one that decides if you get any revenues, or not at all. We live in a fast changing environment. Everything is going on in blinding speed (not to be take literally), even users’ attention span is as short as a monkey’s temper. They will not wait any longer than 30 seconds to wait for your page to load and, remember, not everyone has a fast connection. Some are still using dialup.
According to Jacob Nielsen, Web usability guru, users have more difficulties in
reading the information on computers rather than on printed editions. Which comes to – poorly written content. This doesn’t always mean that your content is of poor quality. Rather it is about the formatting of the content. There is only so much screen estate, and cramming too much content into a page is confusing.
Try to divide them into smaller sections. Add sub headings to indicate the topic of that portion and use fonts that are readable. Verdana and Times are the most common of them all. And set the size of the fonts to a reasonable size, not too big, and neither must it be too small.
Do not use excessive animations and graphical elements in the website. They are fine when used at a reasonable number. Adding too much of it will only make the website confusing and slow to load. Keep flash (.swf) files to certain types of usage, such as demos and presentations.
The most important factors of them all – Navigation menus. You have to be really clear on this design element. Do not go too deep on the sub-categories. Users just do not want to dig too deep into a website just to find something. 3 is the magic number. Make sure you indicate properly visited and unvisited hyperlinks.
Finally, make sure your website validates to most major web browser clients. Nowadays users do not only use Internet Explorer. There is Firefox, Opera, Netscape Navigator and many others. And ensure compatibility for older versions of the browsers is a good practice.
This is not a comprehensive list, but is a good start for you to begin in caring for the comfort and feasibility of your web visitors. As you go along the way into creating your website, you will take into notice the many different aspects in which you can improve on for your customers.
|
By Location