After waking up from the cave this morning, I decided to have a browse around on the Internet for some relevant articles. I came across this one posted over at Blackwater Blog. It outlines a few aspects of website design that should be avoided. After spending quite some time browsing quite a few websites, I decided I would have a go and list my own! Anyway, here we go.
In no particular order.
1) Background Music
Personally, this my pet peeve. I hate background music when visiting a website. Not only does it slow down the loading time but it’s a startle when you are either a)Already listening to loud music or b) Don’t have any music on at all. If the website wants to have background music, I think the visitor should have to press a play button.
2) Advertisements Galore
Now I know people want to make money, but having a site that is FULL of adverts, and I mean full. I don’t mind sites that have a section of their layout devoted to adverts, but putting them in every possible place surely lowers the chance of them being clicked? Personally, if I saw a site like this I would be leaving it immediately.
3) Full Flash Website
This is more of a personal dislike than anything. Flash websites can look extremely nice in some cases, but in others I think it is just too much. I prefer a professional, sleek and simple website. One that is easy to navigate and has a nice color scheme. There are the things that hit me once I’ve done the first design of a website, which leads me to scrapping the design and doing the second, even the third!
4) Keyword Stuffing
I am sure that everyone knows this already but I had to include it. Keyword stuffing is good and bad. Good because it can boost your keyword results (in theory!) but bad because you run the risk (high I believe) of being removed from search engines. Instead of keyword stuffing, it is just as easy to re-read your content, change a few words, add a new page like a blog. Include the latest blog on the main page as long as it is relevant. If it is not relevant, you are moving backwards because you are lowering the density of the existing keywords.
5) Silly Fonts
This part of the website design process I find extremely difficult. When designing any banners or headers, I really struggle with finding a suitable font. The font has to suite the existing web-safe fonts that I would be using on the content of the site. Some fonts I particularly like are “Dax” (The UPS Font), “Delicious” font-family and Arial. However, some that I don’t like include “Comic Sans” and “Courier”. (Just my preference!)
If you have anymore to add, leave me a comment!
Jack
