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The Top 5 Web Design Mistakes
It's all very well us rattling on every month about the very best in design, insight and wisdom, sucked directly from the brains of the brightest in the industry.
But while adding that extra layer of polish to your site is important, it's also vital not to neglect the design basics. However attractive-looking your homepage, however cutting-edge your images, break one of design's fundamental rules and you're heading for disaster on a truly monumental scale.
- Inconsistent Design
Gone are the days when designers peppered layouts with every font known to man and the kind of colour palette that would make a drunken hippy blush. However design consistency isn't at the fore of every designers mind. With mondern design tools and rigorus use of style sheets and semantic markup, it's not like consistency is particularily hard to achieve. Avoid having 20 different button styles going on in the one website, or a dozen font styles, or your layout will end up looking like a jumble sale.
- Design before content
The mantra "content is king" has been hammered home since people finally realised Flash intros weren't big and weren't clever, and yet many sites appear to have been constructed with little thought to their content. "You should never design anything before you have a clear grasp of the content. In other words design for your content: don't insert content into the design as an afterthought".
- Making HTML-Like Flash Sites
This mistake could probably have gone under the broader title of 'using the wrong technology'; but, hey, its the Flash issue that really gets our goat. Siim Vips, CEO of Internet development and marketing company Modera agrees. "I'm sick of seeing Flash sites that look like regular HTML" he says. "They look like normal web pages, but you can't scroll using regular keys, often can't copy and paste text, and so on".
- Not making a site's purpose clear
"You can't expect all users to put in effort" says Dave Luff, senior designer at Digital Outlook, on what he calls t"he biggie" of all design mistakes. He's talking about sites that "force" users to put in work finding out what the site is about. "There's no reason to force a user to your 'About' section to find out who you are," he says. "No matter how good your website looks, if i don't know roughly what's going on i'll leave."
The solution he argues, is astonishingly simple: "From the moment a user hits your homepage, get your site's purpose across. If it's selling rubber gloves, i need to know that sharpish".
- Visual Flair over user experience
No matter how pretty a site is, people won't bother with it if the user experience is poor. If people can't use your site, no one will see it, and if there's no focal point you'll struggle to attract and retain users. We reommend limiting your font palette, keeping typography consistent site-wide and using limited colours, also create a basic structure to your site; where the navigation belongs, where the content exists etc. Once you have made these rules, stick to them and you can build your eye-candy around a strong foundation.
source .net magazine, issue 176
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