Showing posts with label Website Mistakes. Show all posts

Some of the most effective way’s to create an efficient website is to make sure that you offer your visitors simplicity. Identify at the beginning that the focus of your website design is to accommodate your users. Being able to quickly and efficiently retrieve the information that the visitor is looking for should be your number one priority. Don’t get caught up offering them a substantial amount of insignificant information. Also remember to create your design from the user’s point of view.

Here are a few factors that can greatly affect the efficiency of your website:

Poorly Written Content

It has been said that users tend to scan website content while thoroughly reading print content. This means that you are to avoid large blocks of text and break up your content and make it more visually comprehensive. Have you ever noticed while reading a magazine article or newspaper ad that they will take a short blurb of some key content and then reprint that in a bigger font within a box? This is so readers can scan through and decide if they have found the information that they were either looking for or is of interest to them.

Some other Effective Content Writing Techniques that will simplify information for your users will be to:
· * Separate Your Paragraphs

· * Use Indentations or Bullets

· * Add Titles and Subtitles

· * Different Fonts and Sizes

· * Add Bold to Some of Your Lettering

· * Utilize Hyperlinks

Lengthy Website Downloading Time

70% of web surfers will leave if your site takes over 7 seconds to load.

The time it takes the user to download your website is an extremely important factor. Your users will jump out of your website with one click of a button if you inconvenience them in any way while they are trying to find what they are looking for. There is nothing wrong with flash or graphics. They both can be used very resourcefully, however, you must be careful not to overkill the download time. You also need to keep in mind the fact that some of your visitors may still be using a dial up modem.

Clumsy Navigational Flow

One thing that can easily frustrate a visitor to your website is if they have trouble finding what it is they are looking for. It will additionally hurt you if they can’t find the information, products, or services that you want them to find. Having a poor flow structure can make the user feel lost. Here are a couple of tips to insure that the user will be able to get around comfortably on your website:

· * Can your user enter your website from any page and still be able to understand where they are at, and how to get to where they want to go by clicking on the appropriate link.

· * Always provide a site map to your users. A site map will give the user the opportunity to familiarize their self with your site’s structure. In addition it will benefit you when the search engine spiders show up to index your pages, if you have a “site map” link on every page.

· * Don’t put blue text, outside of links, on your website as this is common for users to think that it is a link. This can confuse your visitor.

· * Always have a link to the home page on every page of your site. Never put the user in a situation where they get lost on one of you pages and don’t know how to get out.


Overly Complex Design

If you have an abundance of complex designs, you can actually overload it and make it unclear as far as its downloading, visibility on their monitor, and also among various browsers. The usability of your website can also be greatly hindered through the use of frames. Give your web pages clearly defined title tags explaining what your page is about.

http://www.dhamakanews.net/webdesign.htm

Designing a slick, attractive Web site takes practice and persistence. With time and feedback from visitors, you'll learn what makes them come back for more and what causes them to abandon your site after one quick stop. Few site owners do the job perfectly the first time: thankfully, you can always upload updated pages as you make improvements.

Experience is the best teacher, but here's something to start you on the road to a solid, professional Web site: things that you should always leave out. No matter what type of site you design – personal, business or somewhere in between – these things should never find their way onto your pages.


. Flashing graphics. If the neon-green-and-white image gives you an instant migraine, odds are your visitors will have the same problem. Keep the headache-inducing elements as far away from your site as possible.

. Sound files that automatically load. The auto-loading option only wastes valuable time that can be better spent loading your real content. And many visitors surf with their speakers turned off anyway, just to avoid annoying website noises. You may want to provide brief audio or video clips, but always make them voluntary!

. Clashing backgrounds and blocks of text. Grey text on a graphical background of court house steps won't work. You'll be able to read some bits and pieces, but most will be lost in the image.

. Embedded ad windows that were designed to foil pop-up blockers. These ads aren't quite embedded: they cover your page's content until the user does something with the ad windows. Stick with text-based ads, like Google's AdSense, to generate a little money from your site.

. Extremely long pages. Break them up into different pages and use HTML coding to link them together. Users would rather have quick-loading, short pages than one massive document that requires endless scrolling.


. Pointless Flash animation. There's a reason that many Flash elements include the "Skip Intro" option. Unless it's necessary, or at least does something semi-productive for your content, skip the elaborate intro.

. Too many PDF files. Use these to package information that users will download and read offline. For online reading, keep it to HTML and plain text. This option is faster and encourages people to keep checking out your content.

. Excessive use of the "open new browser window" command. Unless your link guides visitors to an external source, make sure that new pages open in the same window.

. Script-style or other hard-to-read fonts. Stick with a basic font like Times or Arial to avoid eyestrain – and retain visitors.

. Typos, typos, typos. Even people who weren't English majors hate reading misspelled or incomplete words.

Now that you know ten of the most common problems, you can start making improvements. This might be discouraging, but don't think of things that way. Instead, think of how much you now know about making better sites and retaining your visitors.

Work on the problem gradually to avoid the discouragement. Fix one major problem per day, or every couple of days, and be sure to keep in touch with your visitors. Use your mailing list, front page announcements section and even your blog to let visitors know that you're making changes.

They'll come back, if only to see how much work you've done. And when they see how user-friendly your site has become, they'll bookmark your URL for return visits.

Source : http://www.jurisdesign.com/design-website-mistakes.aspx