The design and layout of a website is extremely important, as it helps to enhance the user experience for visitors.
Having things laid out in a logical way makes it easy for visitors to navigate to specific sections of your website without having to waste time trying to find out where the content they wish to access is.
Unfortunately, many people (including supposed ‘professional’ web designers) make some really bad mistakes when it comes to designing websites. Here are 7 of the worst ones:
1. Not having a Search Facility
Even if your website is organised in such a way that pages are easy to locate, there comes a time when some visitors want to search for a particular page without having to go through every single menu option or guess where it could be categorised.
This is especially important when your website has a blog and people want to search for certain blog posts. If your website doesn’t have a search facility, it can make life difficult for visitors to seek out the information they need.
2. Crazy Colour Schemes
I’m all for websites having colourful elements in them; after all, if they were all monochrome they would look pretty boring! But some people really don’t have an eye for colour and end up choosing all sorts of whacky colour schemes!
3. Too much Text
Have you ever gone on a website and nearly died of boredom after seeing its home page filled with enough text to complete a novel?
Coming across websites like that make me want to hit that back button and go to another website instead – and this is what will happen with your website visitors if you bombard them with too much information!
4. Stale Layout
Some websites appear to have been locked in a time warp and haven’t changed much since 1997. Just because your website looked awesome a few years ago doesn’t mean it will look awesome today.
Content management systems and online website builder software make it easy to apply different ‘themes’ to a website, so there really is no excuse for freshening up your website every so often.
5. Poor Font Choices
Sometimes the fonts used on a website can make text extremely difficult to read. People have obviously realised there is a world outside of Comic Sans MS and started using all sorts of stupid fonts – especially on business websites!
6. Lack of Consistency
When you look at a website, you expect there to be some form of consistency across the different pages. For example, on a multimedia website which makes use of high definition background images, the navigation system should still be the same.
Many websites often have completely different-looking pages, and such things will confuse even the most seasoned of web users!
7. Non-responsive Layouts and Designs
Responsive web design refers to the art of creating layouts and designs which adapt or ‘respond’ to different screen resolutions and devices.
So rather than the website having the same size across all screens and devices, it will resize to ensure that the content is still attractive and legible whether you are using a desktop computer, a tablet or a smartphone.