What role should your website play? Should it be informative or entertaining or serve as a shopping portal?
These are undoubtedly some most important factors you need to consider while creating a website, there are something more your web design company should focus on. Irrespective of the purpose of your website, providing user-friendly experience should be your prime concern when it comes to website designing. And to do so, the following are top 10 mistakes your web design company must avoid.
Failing to change visited links’ color:
It is important understand the past navigation as by knowing the past and present locations will help your visitors to decide where they want to go next. And links play an important role in navigation process. Changing the color of the links that the particular user has visited will help them to avoid revisit the same pages repeatedly.
Bad search:
If you are using overly literal search engines that are unable to deal with typos, hyphens, plurals and other variants in query terms, it will reduce usability of your website. Advanced search is often helpful, however, it is best to use simple search, presented as a simple box.
Low search engine visibility of page titles:
Search engine visibility is the most important factor for any online business. The humble page title will actually help you to attract new visitors. Make sure your page title is included within the HTML tag, ask your web design company to make them a clickable headline on search engine result pages. Use short titles as search engines show only the first 66 characters
PDF files for online reading:
While browsing, if you come across a PDF file, may look fancy, but it will only break your flow. And users don’t like it. It is hard to navigate the undifferentiated blob of PDF’s content and standard browser commands are of no use here.
The sole purpose of a good website is to provide interactive experience to the visitors. But non-scannable text is intimidating. Make sure your web design company is writing for online readers, text that support scannability. Use subheads, highlighted keywords, bulleted lists, and short paragraphs. Also, follow the inverted pyramid structure for your content and use simple language and a simple writing style.
Violating design conventions:
One of the most important usability principles is consistency. Users know what to expect and what will happen, based on their previous experience. This provide them a feeling of being in control of the system. But when you break their expectations, they will start feeling insecure and leave at once.
Fixed Font Size:
CSS style sheets do have their own set of advantages, but they allow websites to disable a Web browser's button to “change font size”. Besides, they specify a fixed font size, which is usually tiny and significantly reduce readability of users over the age of 40.
Content/ design looking like an advertisement:
Web users no longer pay attention to advertisements that get in their navigation process. Thus, it is recommended to avoid designs or content that look like advertisements.
Opening new browser windows:
This is one of the most annoying experiences web users hate to come across. By doing this, you are only polluting your visitors’ screen with more windows., every time they click a link. There is already an option called “open in new window” in their browsers and users are already aware of it.
Not answering the questions of your users:
It is not only a bad manner, but also damage your brand image. You can lose sale if you fail to answer your users’ queries.
About The Author:
David Gomez is a pro-blogger, providing web designer services. He owns a web design company in New York. David loves experimenting with designing and graphics and has written several articles and blogs about the role of a well designed website in SEO.
