One sure-fire way to make your brand more unpopular is to develop a website with an awful user interface and design. From bad navigation and inappropriate fonts to slow-loading pages and auto-playing music, these web design faux pas can surely help your website fast track its way to readership oblivion. Is your website guilty of committing these cardinal sins of web design? Find out by reading this list.
Complex navigation
Multi-level navigation menus can confound your visitors. If your topics are not intuitively classified, your readers are going to have a hard time trying to make sense of it all. Furthermore, such menus also require too much hovering and digging into the lower tiers, which can annoy web users tremendously. Enable better navigation and accessibility by simplifying your navigation. Keeping the dropdown menu to two tiers maxiumum is a good rule to follow.
Auto-playing audio or music
Music or audio that starts playing without being prompted is a great source of exasperation among many web users. You might think it’s creative, but these pop-up elements are not received well by most people. A lot of them would rather close such websites altogether rather than look for the small pause or “x” button to stop the offending sounds.
Inappropriate fonts
Don’t frustrate your readers by using fonts that are not easily legible. They’re unlikely to appreciate whatever you thought was the artistic merit of using such fonts. Furthermore, there’s also the danger of your site being perceived as unprofessional-looking when too much stylized fonts are used, especially in the body of articles.
Slow-loading pages
At a time when competition is driving more and more businesses to make their websites more user friendly and more attractive to potential customers, you simply can’t afford to have a slow-loading site. If you are going to let your readers wait, chances are they won’t have the patience for it. Make sure that your web developer optimizes your site’s code and server setup to improve its performance in terms of speed.
Splash and flash
Gone are the days when the next best thing to sliced bread were introductory splash pages that require Flash Player to play and necessitates visitors to click enter. They took too long to load, which is why most people didn’t like them. However, make no mistake; a lot of websites are still using splash pages and flash animation in their home pages. If your website is one of these, get that splash page off your site now and kill it with fire. Unless, of course, if you a have a good excuse for using one, like when you need to present an important advertisement or if you are using it as a way to direct visitors to choose important preferences for viewing your site (e.g. language settings).
Disrespect for browser and device compatibility
Lastly, websites that can’t be viewed properly in different browsers and device types risk losing their readers over poor user experience. Make sure that your website is optimized for everyone to see.
In web design, not everything that is created by professionals is intuitive and aesthetically creative. You have to be in touch with how your audiences perceive your website in order to improve the way they use it and engage with it.
