Kleinburg Brewery
- design
- / web
With over a billion websites floating around in cyberspace, you’ve got to take out all the stops to make sure that yours manages to stand out. Every second that goes by, many more websites pop up. But designing and developing a website that is able to withstand the competition isn’t exactly the easiest challenge to overcome.
However, there are some specific things that you need to do throughout the web design process, as well as mistakes to stay away from. Here are just a few that you should avoid.
1. A Massive Home Page Image
Having nice images and graphics on your website is great, but if they’re so big and shiny that they completely overshadow what your website is all about, you’re not doing your website any favours. It really does not make much sense. Unless you’re a photographer or artist who is showcasing your best work, there’s no need for over-the-top images on your home page. What you should be showcasing is your service or product. Avoid this mistake and instead, get right down to what it is that your website has to offer.
2. Intrusive Pop-Ups
It can be really annoying to be reading through some text only to be bombarded with pop-ups that seem to come out of nowhere and frequently. Whether these are ads, opt-in forms, or buttons to click to share on a social media, they’re bothersome. Once in a while is OK, but too frequently and too many requests are enough to scare people off. Instead, if you’re going to use pop-ups, focus only on one thing, and make sure they don’t spring up every 2 seconds.
3. Poor Navigation
People who are on the internet already need to have information at their fingertips, or else they wouldn’t be on it in the first place. An important component of this speed is the navigation: if it takes people forever to find what they’re looking for, they’ll get agitated and leave as quickly as they arrived. It’s cumbersome to have to go back a couple of pages just to get to other parts of a website. Ideally, your site should have a navigation bar on each page that helps guide users to other areas of your website, and it should be easily located without having to scroll down or across to find.
4. Slow Servers
As mentioned above, nobody wants to waste their time on websites that don’t give them the information they need right away. They want information right now, and that’s why they’ve taken to the internet. When it comes to professional business websites, slow load times are simply inexcusable. Studies have shown that internet users will only wait four seconds for a website to load before they move on. If it takes longer than this for your website to load, it’s time to fix things. Whether you’ve got too many images that are weighing it down, or have too many pop-ups, it might be time to make some changes.
5. Pages Opening in New Windows
While many website designers and developers may have once liked the idea of pages to other websites opening up in new windows, this is more of a nuisance now more than anything else. These days, viewers find this to be annoying since it ties up the system’s resources, and just complicates the entire experience. Now that tabbed browsing is more common, anybody who wants to open links in a new tab has that option if they want.
Your website has a big job to do, and it’s got to contend with all the other websites out there that are fighting for the same attention. While web design and development involves a lot of work, you can make things easier on yourself by focusing on what works, and avoiding the things that will just bog your site down.