10 Blunders to Avoid on Business Websites

A websites appealing and making a positive impression to its visitors holds the maximum probability of getting targeted website traffic and hence business. It is very rightly said that first impression is the last impression, so the focus must be to make the design part strong and appealing. The time period of making an impression on the visitor is nearly 3 seconds.

For that reason, you must focus on blunders that are responsible to hurt the website performance. The most common 10 big blunders done by a designer are as follows;

Poor use of colors

Colors have psychological characteristic. They do not only regulate mood and emotions of common visitors but are a great way to reflect overall identity and image of your brand. Therefore, to make a right use of colors is crucial for a designer. Also, wise use of colors gives good reading experience to the users whereas poorly used combinations make things incomprehensible for them. A bad selection of colors can annoy the end users and, as a result, prove harm to your website.

Bad Layout and Design

Another area of focus is the layout of a website. A layout should be designed in a way to give user a comfort in navigating a site. A layout is considered user-friendly when a visitor is able to find what he/she is looking for without putting much effort. To design an effective website layout, one doesn't have to follow a set standard but following certain guidelines could be useful. Layout of a website should be designed with a sense of order and consideration. A site that behaves as one stop to share out information without a proper planning is certainly unable to attract anyone to click anything on your site, other than back-button.

Browser Compatibility

A site with browser compatibility is another important aspect of a good web site design. In today's technological world, there are a number of web browsers evolved such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera, Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and many more, for windows and linux, creating a need to design cross browser multiple websites. Make sure that the website designed is compatible to all browsers in terms of design layout and backend codes structuring. The uses of HTML, CSS or JavaScript enforce the site to behave differently on different browser. Therefore, it is important to develop a site fully compatible and one that appears more or less similar on each browser.

Broken Links

Another blunder made in a web site design is presence of broken links. Sites containing broken links are considered as unprofessional. Broken links not only annoys your visitors, but it has the risk to get penalized by Google and in extreme cases, removed forever from the search engines. Most commonly, a user receives 404 error appeared on the page after clicking on broken link, which indicates that the specific page is not available. Another type of broken link is URL not relevant to the content searched for. This occurs either due to lapse of domain name or subsequently, the URL is registered by other party. Broken links are also occurred when the web content is brought together, copied or distributed without completely verifying the target.

Absence of Site Map

The list of the web pages contained in a site is, usually, called sitemap. A sitemap gives information about each page of a website to Google. The creation and submission of sitemap also helps those URLs to discover and recognized by Google, which is not always discovered by its usual crawling process. A website presentation or a sitemap acts as a roadmap for visitors to carry out an effective application.

Java or other scripting used excessively

Web designers usually do blunder while using Java or other scripting by using it excessively. JavaScript is a web language built into all major browsers to enable programmatic access to objects. It facilitates the development of enhanced user interfaces and creates special effects on a website. Too many scripts used in a page make it overloaded and the page takes extra long while loading. Furthermore, more than one script used in a page results in causing one of the scripts or both of them non-functional. Even though, the conflicts caused by overly used script.

Use of frames

Frames are an HTML feature that helps control the layout of a website in the user's browser. They facilitate division of browser window into various rectangular sections, which can be treated as separate browser windows. These sections can be scrolled, resized and loaded with different web pages. Frames are used to give structure to a website. If used badly, they can make your site look patchy, haphazard, crowded and sometimes downright unusable on some hardware setups. Users find such frames annoying.

Typos

Your page looks amateurish when it contains any grammatical or spelling mistake. It is hard to avoid any typographical errors for a visitor. People may consider your business unprofessional or think that the venture has been setup newly and is not the established one. Do not forget, content is the King for readers as well as for search engines. Fonts used should be easy to read and there should be proper placement of the words.

Security

Security is one of the biggest aspects of apprehension in website design. Billions of people use World Wide Web to execute activities like shopping, banking, buying airline tickets or performing a simple research. Therefore, personal identities like, names, addresses, credit card numbers, passwords or phone numbers are regularly transferred and stored in several locations. Now days, there is a significant increase in the cases of Web attacks because to protect a site from hackers has become really difficult. A customer has the chances to leave your site if he/she doesn't find it secured or reliable in appearance. Ensure that the checkout procedure is easy, clear, concise and secured to make the customers feel confidant and secured while using your site for any purpose.

Using free or Cheap Web Hosting Services

A web site leaves first impression on people’s mind about your business. Websites hosted on an overloaded web server is obviously a big turn off. Web hosting services that are offered at cheap price or claimed to be offered free, are of no use. These days, a good web hosting company provides services at a relatively low price, may be from $15 to $20 a month. Do not make blunder in trying to save just a little amount of money. If a web page takes more than 10 seconds in loading, the audience is compelled to leave your site at the very same time. It is very important to provide them information in a timely fashion to keep them stick to your site.


Posted on : 16-10-2009 | By : Admin | In : Graphic Design

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