okay i am writing this because i felt that i should point out some things. not pointing anyone out inparticular but it's just good practice in my opinion. now these may not be the top 10 design mistakes to you, but to me they are important and should be considered. these are my inconsistant ramblings about the mistakes that people make in their design and deployment of web applications as i see them today. 1) load times. web pages that take forever to load. every one has seen them and everyone hates them. it's all about semantics when it comes to the web. use style sheets. seperate design elements from structural markup thus making the page smaller in filesize and resulting in a faster load time. not only does semantic markup make page loads faster it also makes updates easier. 2) navigation. navigation should be the most important thing on your website next to the content. if people cannot figure out where your navigation is or what it leads to then it's just plain useless. this goes for "mystery meat navigation" especially. you know, navigational elements that you have no idea what they are. most of the time an icon maybe and then when you put the mouse over it, it MAY tell you what it is depending on who did it. either way, it is a bad idea. no one wants it to be guesswork when navigating a website. the choices should be clear as day and right to the point. plain and simple, easy peasy. 3) flash. now this is nothing against flash itself. flash is a really nice tool that when used right can produce spectacular elements and add to any design. where people go wrong with it is that they do whole websites in flash. sure it's cool yeah i will give it that. but think about it, how many flash websites have to be pre-loaded because of the heavy filesize. im guesstimating on average 80%. now how many of these take over a minute to load? probably 50% of that. i don't know about you, but after say 30 seconds of waiting for a page to load, i will find somewhere else to go. i am impatient as hell and i shouldn't have to wait for your cheesy animation to load. 4) light text on a light background. you can't read it. plain and simple. if i have to struggle to read something, it isn't worth it. now i am sure i am not the only one who feels this way. it should be avoided as much as possible. words are meant to be read (most of the time) and if no one can read them, again... it's useless information. time for me to go somewhere else where someone actually wants me to read the information that they are trying to convey to me. the reader. 5) color. this may seem like an odd "mistake" but a lot of people do it. the colors of a website are important. they shouldn't collide together to make the website look like it just got hit by a freight train. the colors that you choose in your design process should work well together and offer a visually stimulating experience to the end user. this in itself leaves for a wide range of simple mistakes. some colors that look good together can still make a website look horrible. it's about the placement of the colors and how they affect one another. also, too many colors is a bad thing in my opinion as well. sure the rainbow like websites are cool and all... if your under the age of 7 but they can make the website look really "busy" when used too much. try to stick with 3-4 base colors or even less. shades are okay just try to base them on some of the colors in your chosen palette. play around, you'll see what i mean. 6) layout structure. this one really isn't a "bad" practice as it is more of an idea. if you're a designer and you're doing a portfolio site, don't limit yourself to the standard "A-Typical" design. try something different. steer away from the header on top and footer on bottom centered layout design type deal. think outside of the box, be different, stand out from the crowd, try something new. i don't remember where i saw this but it was freaking pure genius. instead of doing the normal everyday vertical layout design, a designer decided that he or she wanted the website to scroll horizontally. this was pretty awesome if you ask me. mainly because it showed me that the designer was a creative one who liked to think outside of the box and try something new. now i am not telling everyone to go and do horizontal layouts but that was just an example and a perfect one for this. so get out there and be creative. try something new. i think i can, i think i can... 7) content. content is king. no matter how you look at it, the content of your website is the most important part of it. it is what makes the visitors come to your website again and again. design is a huge factor in a website as well but without content, it's just a fancy design that no one will likely see. and if they do, they'll be more likely to forget about it because you offered them nothing but pretty graphics. people goto websites for information. if your website is lacking information on a particular subject (whatever your website is dedicated to) it will likely lack visitors as well. 8) fonts. the font plays an important role in any website. it should be readable yet soft on the eyes. i see a lot of people these days using graffiti and grunge style typefaces on their headers and logos. while this might look okay to a younger designer or even a beginner, it's not okay. graffiti and grunge fonts have their places but it's definitely not on the web. not unless the website is about graffiti or has an urban theme. even then sometimes they look horrible. it's all about how you use it in conjunction with the actual text typeface of your website. there are 7 fonts that are platform independant (meaning that they're supplied with the majority of operating systems and installed by default). they are as follows; arial, comic sans, courier new, georgia, times new roman, trebuchet, and verdana. georgia, verdana, and trebuchet were specifically designed for the screen and are usually my main choices. if you can make your graffiti or grunge font work with these, congratulations. not many people can. try to stick with something sans-serif for the most part if you can as it has a more 'clean' and 'professional' feel to it. 9) too much text. most users don't read websites, especially me. we skim a website until we find what we are looking for or we find something that interests us. i can imagine that after opening this page and seeing the abundant amount of undesired reading that is going to be involved in reading this post alone, that most people will just simple navigate away. it can be overwhelming. try and break it up some. add links in there somewhere. make it interactive so to speak. 10) line height. line height is important for easy reading. sure it looks better when the text is closer together from a designer's point of view. but it really makes it a chore to read and it shouldn't be. no one wants to struggle to read what you wrote. the information that you are trying to convey should be as clear as possible and accessible by the majority of visitors. now these were in no particular order so if you feel that something should have came before something else on the rating scale then so be it. im not a writer by any means so i apologize in advance for any spelling and/or grammatical errors that you may come across and i am sure that you will. i just wanted to try and give something back to my community and be a part of it. try and help others achieve what i have learned not to do over the years and maybe help them avoid some of the mistakes that i have. i hope some of you find this information useful and use it willingly. Regards, ansi
Nice guide, you could also add SEO to that, some people put up a website and expect to get tons of visitors with no seo work or linkbuilding.
seo is definitely an important aspect of any website but i think i was going more for design aspects than i was anything else. even though i did start off with semantics but yeah... like i said, i'm not much of a writer lol i just wanted to try and give something back to the community that i am a part of.
Nicely put, Trav! I agree with everything you said, and learned some things from it too. But you're right on with the design ideas, they apply pretty much exactly the same way with print, which is my background. Well, except for the "load times" info... that doesn't really work for print. ;-) You da man!
What an excellent guide SEO is very essential, it's what most webmasters miss because it doesn't work well design wise there needs to be a good balance between the two. A small easy mistake (That doesn't disrupt the design) would be to name image files with meaningful names/keywords and using alt tags.
thanks dan and 8everything. and a nice touch my you 8everything. alt tags are very important when it comes to images. not only for search engines but screen readers as well.
if you read the bottom i told you ahead of time that they were bound to be in there somewhere. i could fix it but then it might confuse people now! see what you did.
I actually knew many of that, but I still like your list. Also I recommend to all web designers to read the book "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, which is a great web usability resource and helps think you different when designing websites.
im glad that everyone is enjoying it and finding it helpful. i might write some more in the future it was pretty fun so we'll see
Great comments and opinions. 1) load times - This could also be due to few things, Hosted server(which provide anonymous of numbers website in just 1 server, or the broadband you having, is a slow(maybe under maintaining) some place are fast(8MB+) some place are slow like 56k(believe me,it still exist). 2) navigation - some great webmaster creatively might actually create their own world of navigating through their web. 3) flash - if you look at some well known website, they really use flash for their site, indeed it load up slow, but back to no.1, load times, it always depend on your broadband connection and also the file size of the flash. 4) light text on a light background - some website did it purposely hiden words and so, but there are new webmaster just starting to learn. 5) color - lets take cola for example, its simply red. nice one though it suits its brand. 6) content - its important, truely agree, not too much salt and not too less sugar. If you read on News website, less content will make the reader questioning themself and also the reporter. The rest, i think most of the webmaster have their own kind of thoughts and thinking. Conclusion, its good for you to bring up this.
thanks for the tips, good post! about seo and content, I can do seo if the client wants but I don't care about content, my job is to design not to run a site. And about the fonts, they should match the adsense ads
haha, right on. good way to get a few undesired clicks hehe. as for content from a designer's standpoint, it's up to you to make the content look good.