Website Design: Flaws Can Affect Your Online Business

Every day a growing number of Internet users come across some impressive website design mistakes ranging from garish pop-ups to confusing link-filled sites that can ruin the user’s joyous online experience. Undoubtedly, building a website can be daunting but the real challenge is to make it user-friendly. The problem is most web designers forget that websites aren’t created for their own use only but are aimed to solve the needs of Internet surfers; they often tend to prioritise creativity and ignore usability when designing a site. Let’s have a look at the most common website design blunders that can affect your online business.

Lack of organisation

Content organisation can make your website a success or a failure. According to recent research, the average user doesn’t read text blocks unless absolutely necessary but scans through them and pick points of interest. Blocks of text with neglected headings, subheadings, bulleted lists, paragraphs and keywords are typical of many sites with bad website design. Some designers even forget to name web pages, so users don’t know exactly where they are and have to look for information trusting their instincts only. The worst thing is to put inaccurate, insignificant or outdated information on your website. This can move your site down towards the bottom of the search engine results list and cause profits to drop by a lot.

Difficult to navigate

When content organisation appears to be a mess, web surfers are unlikely to keep on browsing through such a website. Instead they will probably hit the ‘Back’ button and return to Google’s search results or turn to the last option, the search box. The search box is often considered the most frequently used design element on websites with haphazard content. If content is disorganised, an efficient search engine tool is not only helpful but crucial for basic site navigation. Professionals creating good quality website design tend to play down advanced search and scoping on the home page and offer a user-friendly search box instead.

Unreadable content

Readability is a fundamental element of web design. Certainly, a good interface design will catch the user’s attention but they have to scan text to find information they need. Some websites use the most bizarre font styles and sizes that make reading text almost impossible. Using CAPS in the body is said to decrease contrast between letters and increase the time spent on reading text. A great variety of font styles can also draw the user’s attention from information provided and slow down scanning. According to website design experts, font sizes are effective differentiating elements as they work as signs that say ‘Here is important information’, ‘Here is a new section’ etc. Different font sizes should be used to arrange and emphasise the heading, the subheading and the body yet using more than 3 font sizes can make your website look user-unfriendly. Alternatives sizes however can be used for other screen elements, including advertisements and navigation links. Good quality website design is one of the keys to success on the online market, where competition for the user is fierce and novel solutions are introduced time and again. Thousands of sites are created every day yet a great many of them lack quality and abound in web design mistakes. Among countless blunders that can badly impact your online business there are those that make content and navigation of your site user-unfriendly. And how effective is your web design?