Bad Design Characteristics For A Website


Making a poorly designed website is one of the easiest things you can do as a webmaster! You barely need to try! If you want to run a successful high traffic website there are many different elements of design that you need to implement, and ones you need to avoid.

This article will describe some of the major design flaws in many new websites. Design flaws that will reduce your traffic flow, reduce your amount of loyal viewers, and generally annoy people. It is my hopes that be identifying these negative web design attributes that people will be able to reduce the usage of them, thus designing a better more profitable website for themselves.

Excessive use of Frames

In the early days of the web, frames were a normal thing to see. They were all over the place! However with more recently developments in web design frames are really unnecessary thing. There are some useful applications for them, however generally I discourage their use, especially multiple frames on a single website!

Bad Colour Scheme

If your website is too dark or bright you might be hurting your users eyes! Have you ever surfed to a website with a really bright background that just made your eyes hurt when you tried to read something? In addition to the layout colours, font colours and sizes are also very important. You must make sure that your font stands out from your background and is of adequate size!

Unsorted or Useless Websites

Many websites are made by people who didn't really think ahead of time about what they wanted to do. If you can't clearly identify what your website is about, how is your user supposed to? I'm not saying you can make some stupid websites for fun or as a joke, but if it's your business or hobby website, make sure your user knows that.

Infrequent Updates

Some websites are created and then abandoned. I myself have let many websites I had designed in the past die away without updates. If you want to constantly get traffic and keep users interested, it's important to add updates, new pages, comments or just check to make sure your links work still.

Slow Loading

If your website is chalk full of graphics, animations, and sounds there is a good chance that you are blocking many dial up users from your website. Remember that just because you are on a high speed connection, doesn't mean that all the people viewing your website are. If you have lots of multimedia content, try to provide a low bandwidth version of your site for people on slower connections. Another common problem is the web server which hosts your site, if its connection to the Internet is too slow, of if the computer to too over burdened it may be slowing down your website loading speed significantly.

Try to keep these tips in mind when you are designing your website, and selecting your hosting provider. Don't make the same mistakes as many people before you. By thinking out what you want to do ahead of time, and knowing common problems, you can design a better more attractive and high traffic website.

Ken Dennis http://KenDennis-RSS.homeip.net/


MORE RESOURCES:
RELATED ARTICLES
Questions to Ask When Designing a Website for Clients
Questions to ask when designing a Web Site for your client (s)."Excerpt from the book: Graphic Artists Guild, Handbook Pricing & Ethical guidelines Written by: Brent ParkerThese questions are a great tool to use when trying to develop your clients website.
Flash - To Use Or Not To Use?
Out there in the WWW there are thousands sites using flash for their needs. But the majority sites are not in this list.
Ten Basic Steps For Building A Web Site That Works
1. Assemble a web site development plan that is integrated with your overall marketing processes; the content should be consistent with offline materials, the graphics/images don't have to be identical with traditional media, but should be consistent with your overall branding, style guide, usage of colors etc.
What Is Your Websites Most Wanted Response?
You spend time and money promoting your website; but what do you want to achieve (apart from more page views)? Is it more sales of Blue Widgets? Is it more subscribers on your mailing list? To be exact, what is your site's Most Wanted Response?I ask this question because in the excitement of creating your very own website, it is easy to forget (or not even consider) the main purpose of your site! Alas, I talk from experience!In late 1999 I created Shop Tour UK (http://www.shoptour.
Eight Website Pitfalls, and How to Avoid Them
Clutter: Too much noise, too much text, and too little white space mean that customers ignore the content. Customers often scan pages quickly, only reading titles or input prompts until they reach the content they want.
A Web Site That Sells Is All One Needs To Have A Successful Online Business!
There are more than billions of Web Sites, running Online Businesses, offering products and services. But only a few Web Sites manage to make any sale.
The Secrets of The Shriekers
I am constantly bombarded with all sorts of advertisements, single-page sites, and sites offering very little real content but some wonderful new "product" or "service" for sale that purports to make its customers wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.For the purposes of this article, let's refer to Amazing Formula (http://www.
Do-It-Yourself Web Design for Home-Based Businesses
Home-based businesses need a strong web presence to combat the inflated advertising and marketing budgets of their larger competitors, but establishing that presence through a professionally designed and developed web site may not be an affordable option. In many cases, the only cost-effective way to get the web site you want for your business is to do it yourself.
Maximising Web Site Viewability - Browsers
With so many different configurations internet users have their computers set up with, it can be difficult to decide how web sites should be configured so that it is viewable in as many configurations as possible.So in the last 6 months i have been logging the statistics from my web design site to achieve as accurate a result as possible to answer this question.
Website Creativity: Why It Matters Now More than Ever
If one more business owner tells me their website sucks because they're just "too darn busy to deal with it", I'm gonna hurl. That's like saying, "I'm doing business in my dirty underwear because I'm too busy to get dressed.
Web Copywriting: The Psychology Of Scarcity, Less Is More If You Want Faster Sales
Countdown to Armageddon - at least you'd think so judging from some of the garish copy and blaring headlines screaming at you from so many websites.At the opposite extreme though, you've some sites which don't even have a single decent headline anywhere that captures visitors attention, let alone leads them into captivating copywriting that'll get them a sale.
Very Cheap Website Design Services
Are you looking for somebody to build you a website, however do not have a very large budget? This is the position many people find themselves in and are on the lookout for very cheap web design services.There are companies out there or people who are just starting out in a career building websites who to start with will often offer their services at a very reasonable rate, basically to build up a portfolio.
Some File Naming Tricks for Your Online Home Based Business Web Pages
Conventional Wisdom states you should use Sub-Directories to organize your web Pages. Unfortunately the Page Indexing Tools Penalize your Page Rankings when you Do this, Many of the Page Ranking Algorithms in use today deem that pages closed to your Root are of a Higher Value then pages that are further away from your root.
.htaccess to Mask Errors on Your Website
The .htaccess file is a control file located in your webservers directory.
Your Website Visitors - Will They Stay?
I'm sure you've all heard the saying 'Build it and they will come'. Although that may have been true a few years ago, now we must work, and work hard, to get visitors to our websites.
Does Your Homepage Work?
All websites have a homepage. It is the most important page of your site.
Sell Yourself First...Your Key To More Sales
Selling on the internet is a challenge. There is no way to come "face to face" with your potential buyer.
How To Give Your Business Credibility
Let's face it. Buying products and services from the Internet can be a bit intimidating.
7 Tips To Increase Sales With Your Ecommerce Web Site
Ecommerce is just exploding right now on the Net. More and more people are doing their shopping online.
Web Design Advice And Information
Most of us at times need advice on different aspects of life and the thought of obtaining a website can be quite a daunting task for many people. There are so many people offering cheap web design services, therefore how do you know who to choose and what to look for.