Design Tips

Believe it or not, there are web designs that actually scare people away from the site and keep them from coming back. Doing this is something your web design company and you will have to avoid practically all the time. If you do not want your web design company and you to become tarnished or labelled as one of the "Worst web Designers of the net," you need to watch out for this.

Web Design's Scariest Backgrounds:

Setting the background on your site is one of the things that you have the liberty of setting or changing. However, some backgrounds are simply ugly, difficult to read or just plain scary. Here are some sample backgrounds that I am talking about:

• Pure black background with pale, light or white text. Unless you are a professional web designer who belongs to the best web design company in the world, try to avoid this type of background. It looks generally pretentious, not to mention how difficult it is to do well. Some browsers print background colour, and you definitely will not like angry customers complaining about how much ink it caused them to print the page.
• Black with dark text. This is simply illegible and unacceptable. Your customers will have to highlight the text first to make it readable, and this can get really annoying.
• Tiled and busy background images. New web designers find this convenient and amazing, but note that this takes more download time and do not add value to your site on the part of your customers.

Web Design's Scariest Text:

People visit your site for the content that you offer. If they can not view your text, they will leave immediately and not come back. Your web design company does not want this to happen, so be wary of some of the things that you need to avoid:

• Text wherein everything is centered. This makes your page awfully hard to read and look really boring.
• Too much emphasis, headlines, bold, strong or italics. Do not set every line on your page to be highlighted or set as headline. This defeats the web design purpose of setting some text to stand out.
• Blinking text. Even if they can be attractive to some, they are almost always impossible to read!

Web Design's Scariest Content:

You should also pay attention to your content as it is what drives visitors into (or out) of your site. The general rule is to make sure that you put in interesting and eye-catching content and to avoid things like these:

• Content made of pure lists of link. This refers to straight links where every word of every line is a link. (Those that have paragraph explanations to it does not belong to this category.)
• "Cutesy and fun" content. Try not to add in some tricks to get people to laugh. Chances are they will either not understand your humour and you will need to explain it further, or they will simply not go back to your site anymore.

Web Design's Scariest Multimedia:

Multimedia oftentimes becomes the scariest tool ever to hit the web. Your web design company will surely appreciate your multimedia talents and you can show it off when you want to. They usually will take you a very long time to build, so that the more you work hard for it, the more it makes you proud. However, note that the page is never just about you or your web design company. It is about the client who you are web designing the pages for. Do them a favour and do not let them have to sacrifice for you to show off your graphical or Flash skills. Try to avoid the following web design no nos as well:

• Images much too many. These images include those small icons that designed put into their site. The rule of thumb is: if you already have more than two, you now have too many.
• Unreasonable large images. You do not have to publish the print quality versions of photos right into the page. They take too long to load, and are usually not appreciated anyway. Resizing your photos through HTML simply does NOT count.
• Sound. Just try your very best not to put sounds and songs. Mp3, wav or whatever format of audio and songs playing on top of the page that is impossible to turn off, those MIDI files - they are all annoying. If you think your web design will be better off with sounds, make sure you give your visitors the controls to turn it on or off.

Your web design company will definitely not be happy about a scary web design. You surely will not. Your web design should encourage readers to view your page and to stay a little longer looking through it, and not the other way around!

Semul Johnson is a Marketing expert with a leading SEO services company specializing in organic SEO.

// posted by gng @ 8:11 PM 0 comments