Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Make Darn Sure You Avoid Dropping The Ball with Site Design

By Laurence Shimkus


If you want to become involved with web design, then the mistakes that are often made means you have to be committed to your education. There is no getting around this issue because they will happen if you do not learn about them. It is understandable that you may be asking your self what all these mistakes could be about. Let's look into three of the common web design mistakes that can be easily taken care of.

We will get right down to it, your site navigation is one of those critical areas that will either go unnoticed because it is right, or it will immediately be noticed because it is not right. So in order to make the navigation of your site simple, you need to ensure that your visitors are able to search through the whole site without any problem. Adding an effective search option to your website is crucial for easy navigation. This is a standby navigation function that will have its uses for those who cannot find exactly what they are looking for in your content. If your readers like your site and content, then this will merely be the icing on the cake. Some people will tell you that drop-down menus are ill-advised, but we are not always so sure about that. We are sure some readers do not appreciate it, but if everything else is spot-on, then there should be no problems. When you use drop down menus, it might hide the important information and confuse the visitors.

If you really want to be terribly old-fashioned, then go ahead and play music on your site. In the earlier days, you could find tons of sites that welcomed you with blaring music, but the idea miserably failed, which is a good reason as to why you should avoid it. Still though, if you elect to have some kind of music, then do not set it play automatically. You never want to do anything that will annoy your audience or traffic, so view everything from that perspective. Just be sure that it all is highly visible so there is no doubt about it. So do weigh everything out before you place it on your site, and think of how it can affect your visitors.

We have all seen sites that put something in the way between you and the actual site. They have this annoying flash intro that you have to go through before actually getting the real content. If you're going to force your readers to sit through some cheesy intro or get them to read something they don't want, you're going to lose a visitor to the main content of your site. Your aim should be to present your unique offer right when you see the visitor come back, and not risk losing him due to some long, unneeded intro. If you really do want to give information about yourself or your company, you can do it on the 'About Us' page, where it's more appropriate.

These are just a few usability and design mistakes for you to think about and take with you.




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