1. Avoid Pop-ups, Repeating Animations and Clashing Colours
We've all experienced them, two-minute surveys that pop-up every time you visit a website, or even worse, a good-bye greeting that appears when you try to navigate away from the site. Regardless of how well meaning they may be, pop-ups are simply annoying and sometimes alarming, so avoid using them on your website.
Beware of repeating animated images. They irritate and distract and will quickly drive people away. Your visitors should be focusing on your content, so keep your design simple.
Aim for a design that is easy-on-the-eye and includes text that is easy to read. Choose a simple font style with a colour that contrasts with the background. Black text on white is usually the best.
2. Don't Launch While Under Construction
I've made this mistake and launched a website that said, "Under Construction, coming soon!" But, I've learnt my lesson. Visitors are not pleased when their time is wasted by an empty page. They might not come back to see the finished site. Wait until your website has some relevant content on every page before launching.
3. Don't Expect Traffic to Simply Come to You
Websites are great and they are a tremendous bonus to nearly any business, but just having a website won't bring traffic. You need to attract people by promoting your website. Here are 5 ways to spread the word:
- Optimise for Search Engines
- Put your web address on your products and advertisements
- Use Social Media
- Advertise with Google
- Create Press Releases
4. Avoid Too Many Bells & Whistles
Having too many of these will slow down your site and distract from your content. Both people and search engines love websites that load fast. Visitors want to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible and search engines know this. Google will rank a fast-loading site higher.
5. Avoid Long-winded & Disjointed Content
The old "Content is king" adage says it all. People love high quality content. Grab their attention by choosing a catchy heading and keep their attention with short and exciting sentences. Get straight to the point and choose simple wording.
6. Avoid Invalid & Junky Code
It lowers search engine rank and slows down your website, but it's all too common-invalid code. The key is to embrace web standards and clean code. Ensuring that your code complies with these standards will be of great benefit for your website. W3C has a handy tool to check the validity of your code. You can access it at validator.w3.org.
Conclusion:
Keep it simple, useable and well-designed and you'll have a great website. Simplicity means success.
Sam Blaxland is a passionate web designer and graphics designer based in Tamworth, Australia.
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