Walk Straight Through The Road Of Web Design. First Part
Many elements affect the effectiveness of a site, but probably the most important is the web design. An ugly website repels. How can you sell your services or products through your site if it is a horrible mess? Let me walk with you the road of web design for discovering common mistakes you should avoid:
- The decision of someone to stay on a site takes seconds. Attract people! Colors, structure, organization have to be accurately planned. Your site is a reflection of you and your business. People can fall in love with your designs and decide to return.
- Forget unreadable fonts. Make it simple! Fonts like Arial, Lucida and Helvetica are great. Leave small or tiny fonts for a book. On internet people scan the text, don´t make your content looks like a treaty, write short and include bold, bullets and links.
- Don’t force people to fill registration forms for getting information. Internet is the world of easy, fast and free information, don´t make that process complex.
- Never underline a long sentence or a paragraph because people won’t understand what you are trying to link.
- Heavy draws and pictures are makes your website a hell because it works slowly. If you have to wait a lot of time while a page is loading, I’m sure you will go to the competition.
- In the same way, animations could give your site a special touch, but don’t make your web page an animations fair. Overusing Flash kills navigation and accessibility.
- Music makes people feel cool experiences, but let it for discos and concerts. Songs could be a heavy file and a nuisance. Yes it’s true that some information or businesses required an audio; just use a light format and let people to decide if they want to play it; there is nothing more annoying that listening a song again and again if you don’t want.
- Never forget your contact information. How can you sell if nobody can call, write or visit you? A website is not a magician for introducing information in your visitors’ mind. You have to write it, in a visible way or in a ‘contact us’ link.
- Navigation must be obvious. A bar at the top with your main links is great; also, along the texts you should include links to your own website or others, but never the competition!
- Be sure your website is compatible with most of the browsers, all of them are not the same.
Go with the professionals in web design. Don’t take that process as a game! Wait for more tips.
[...] the first part, we saw errors to avoid in web design. Enjoy the second part of this series, while you’re learning what you never have to do in web [...]