An amazing and compelling website isn’t something you can afford to dream about anymore. A bad website can cause the loss of potential customers, that’s money out the door. In my many years of experience, this, unfortunately, occurs quite frequently. Small business owners design their own websites in the hopes to save money. Sometimes, however, they don’t understand the concepts of basic web design. Leading to a less than ideal website that produces one or two conversions if any at all.
Web Design has certain spoken and unspoken “rules” that most web designers follow. It’s not like we have a secret club, It’s a way to combine form and function in a unique way to give every user an enjoyable time when they visit your website. Easy to navigate, interesting content and overall amazing experience. Often people don’t know these rules and that’s when things like this “https://www.theworldsworstwebsiteever.com” happen. (This website is a spoof… but I had my share of sites like this)
Don’t be this website.
- Don’t make users wait for content to load
- Don’t open internal links in new tabs
- Don’t use too many typefaces
- Don’t use too many colours on your website
- Don’t use generic photos of people
- Don’t let promotion steal the show
- Don’t play background music or auto-play videos with music
- Don’t hijack scrolling
- Don’t use horizontal scroll
- Don’t sacrifice usability for the sake of beauty
Do more Amazing
- Keep your interface consistent
- Design easy to use navigation
- Change the colour of visible links
- Make it easy to scan your pages
- Take content seriously
- Check your website for errors
- Minimise the number of choices
- Label buttons according to what they do
- Make things look like they work.
- Make your website responsive
- Test your code, test your design and test the responsiveness
Always keep your target audience in mind for every step of the web design process – From the start of the planning stage to the latest blog post. If you can keep that simple idea along with my do’s and don’ts you’ll have a beautiful website that speaks volumes about your business. build it, and they’ll come.
