How To Banish Bad Web Design Right Out Of Your Site!
Bad web design. It’s everywhere. When ordinary people discovered that throwing up a website was surprisingly easy, especially when simple WYSIWYG software became available, it was inevitable that all the biggest web design mistakes would come pouring out of the woodwork. If you doubt that, just do a search for “Web Pages That Suck” to find a site that highlights the worst of the worst. How bad is bad? You will never stop being amazed!
Imagine you have just innocently landed on a website. Immediately three or four popup ads obliterate the page and prove difficult to impossible to get rid of. Pressing on you try to read the body copy, ignoring the missing graphics, but you find you canít read the text easily as it is yellow on a green background. Deciding to try another page you discover no navigation scheme, or none that is obvious, though something may be hidden among the proliferation of badly placed banner ads. This nightmare is all too common, though most people don’t get that far – they hit the back button first.
You’ve all seen bad web design. It’s characterised by things like confusing page navigation, custom link colors that get overlooked, text hard to read, poor spelling, the worst background imaginable, having to scroll sideways past things that blink, trying to navigate flash or javascript that gives errors, finding pages that are “under construction,” and when you find a link you feel like clicking, it turns out to be a PDF file that takes forever to load! When you find all of the biggest web design mistakes in one place, it really is a bad day.
Good web design is really little more than common sense. The basics of good design has been around for millennia – ever since the Sumerians scratched their writing on clay tablets, through the illuminated texts of the Middle Ages, right up to the best examples of newspaper layouts. Good web design is simply a matter of following the best of what has gone before – not playing your own silly indulgent game just because you can.
There may be the ultimate web design, but you don’t have to have it. You just need to have something that is not bad web design, something that has a minimum of web design mistakes. Keep out all the things that users hate to encounter, eliminate missing graphics, use black text with a good contrast background. White is always a good choice. If you do this you probably won’t eliminate all the mistakes in web design, but what’s left won’t be so noticeable. Bad web design grates; good web design is invisible.
About seoblogger:
Our SEO blogger is an expert in Web Marketing, Usability and Interface Design. He has been a vital part of The Blue Cube Communications since 2003. As the West Midlands fastest growing web marketing agency, we always strive to maximise return on investment for our customers.
