2008-04-15 
Web design is an art that you should take seriously. Your designs should make a good impression on your visitors and most important of all have a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world, if your website is poorly created you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors get turned off by the lousy design.
Good design does not mean only graphical aspect of the process. There are many more areas to focus when creating a professional website.
Balance of these components will contribute to a good creation. Some of the most important factors are accessibility, interface or layout structure, user experience and of course graphic design.
Here are some of the worst design practices I came across. Hopefully, you will be able to compare these against your own website as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it’s high time to some take serious action!
Font choices and sizes
As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics. User accessibility is one of the biggest parts to a well balanced design.
When it comes to fonts, you should always use a easy to read and common font with a readable size so your visitors won’t have to strain their eyes reading your content.
Some of the fonts for this category are Arial (The most favorable), Verdana also popular, Times New Roman, etc. Regarding the font size, you should always use sizes 12px or higher. Use px or em where appropriate.
There are couple of things special about these fonts.
- They are easily readable by users
- Almost all the computers have them installed by default with the system
Pay really careful attention to your fonts. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!
Background music
As a rule background music should only be used in sites running multimedia offers which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music.
Putting background music that loop is really a bad idea. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you are running a large website with hundreds or thousands of pages and every time a user visit a page on your site, the background music starts playing.
If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site.
Since it also takes extra bandwidth to load the music files on slower connections or on dial up lines your visitors will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.
Popup windows
Popup windows are widely used to display advertisements. They can be popup or pop under (loads underneath your current browser window).
Research shows that 90% of popup windows do not get any attention by web surfers. Most users will just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through a popup blocker.
Believe it or not some web designers use popup windows to hold actual site content which is never a good idea. There are exceptions however.
For example we at project web design use popups for our bookmark function. Non of these have our site content in them, they are merely applications that work best on its own window. So remember use popups wisely.
These are some of the elements you should definitely pay serious attention to when it comes to a good web site design.
