Five Cardinal Sins of Web Design

July 8, 2011 at 12:57 pm

Website design is a difficult art to master. A good design needs to be aesthetically pleasing, but also not take attention from the main content of the site. There are many facets to the process and, as such, there are many ways in which it can go wrong. Here are five of the worst possible things you can do, almost certainly resulting in a poor website design.

1. Flooding Your Page With Animations

This shouldn’t be something we have to flag up, but nonetheless websites across the internet try to raise serious points whilst covering their page with flashing GIF images. There are precious few things than trying to read through the information on a company’s website, but then being confronted by a poorly-rendered rotating version of the company’s logo.

That said, on occasion, a well-placed GIF or Flash element can enhance a web page, we would recommend that you avoid them as a general principle.

2. Over-use Of Colours

Maintaining a consistent and professional colour scheme is one of the most crucial parts of a good website design. Websites that use excessive amounts of different colours with little regard for whether or not they go together nearly always suffer due to the distracting nature of the constant colour changes.

A well thought-out and consistent colour scheme also forms the very basis of a quality brand that can establish your company’s persona in a customer’s mind.

3. Poor Font Choice

When visitors to your site read through your content, the amount of information they read through will be controlled by two factors: how interesting the content is and how easy on the eyes the text is. Hence, with a poor choice of font*, you are lowering the amount of content the visitor will be happy to read and thus you run the risk of your information not being read.

*The monstrosity that is ‘Comic Sans MS’ is always a poor choice.

4. Badly Arranged Content

This is a big one. If your content is difficult to find, or arranged in an illogical way, then visitors will be less likely to go to the trouble of locating and digesting the content. No visitor to a website is going to trawl through several levels of hyperlinks and scroll all the way down a page just to find the information they want. They’ll just go and look for your competitors.

5. Blandness

Despite most of these sins involving going over the top with your web design, it is vital that your design does not go too far in the other direction. As soon as a visitor sees a bland, insipid design, they are going to get the impression that your business is bland and insipid and it is unlikely that they will stay around to find out what your content is about.

Website design is indeed a complex art and it is not something that everyone has the knack for. It is better to speak to a professional in the field to ensure that your website is visually pleasing and conveys your content in an attractive way.