The most common website design mistakes are very easy to prevent or fix.

Here's a guide to doing just that.

Avoid distractions on the website

• Don't distract your visitors with blinking or annoying text, flashing banners, scrolling text, animated GIFs, or sound files. Research shows that animated banner ads may be no more effective than static ads, anyway.
• Don't annoy your visitors with pop-up windows. Nobody likes them. They are a waste time and space.
• Avoid clutter. Don't just put all the information up on your homepage with no real order or thought to the layout. Make it easy for your visitors to navigate through the website and find the information they want.

Don't Bog Your Site Down With Large Photos/Multimedia

• Optimise your images and compress them so that it loads quickly into your visitors' browsers.
• Flashy graphics and multimedia controls may look nice, but when it makes it hard for visitors to get the information they want, then it's a bad thing.

Make it Clear How To Contact You

• Put your contact info, or a link to it, on the top or bottom of every webpage. Make it easy for visitors to contact you regardless of which page they are on. Or have a clear contact us page that they can find.
• And while this may sound obvious, when you add your email address on the webpage, link it so that when people click on it, they can email you straight away.

Make it Easy to Find Stuff

• Include a way to get back to the home page, on every page. We recommend including a 'home' tab in your menu bar, so that if your viewers get lost, or want to go back to the homepage to start over again, they can do so easily.
• Take into consideration that your viewers may have landed on your website from another link. So, it's important to include a 'home' link on the website, as they won't be able to just simply hit 'back'.
• Include a top menu bar on every page so that viewers can visit any page they want without forcing them to go back to the homepage if they wish to go somewhere else. You can either include a navigation frame on the left or the top, or include navigation links at the top of each page.
• Don't just put navigation links only at the bottom of pages, because then users will have to scroll down to the bottom to get to them (unless your pages are very short). On long pages, you'll want navigation elements on the top and bottom of your webpages, so that users who have read a lengthy page don't have to scroll back up to get to the navigation parts.
• Make links blue or underlined, or both, so your viewers know they can click on them. Users will already expect links to be blue and underlined, because that's the way they appear on 99% of other websites, but if you do use a different colour, then at least the underline is a clue that it's a link.

Make sure it works, and that it keeps working
 

• Test your links and make sure every page and link works! Thoroughly go through your website and check that all the images appear correctly and quickly, the links work, there are no spelling errors and your enquiry form works.

Readability

• It's hard to read light text on a light background, or dark text on a dark background, so make sure that your viewers can read your content without any difficulty. Also, it's hard to read text on background images that have a wide mixture of light and dark; background images should be simple and mostly dark or mostly light. You can improve readability of text on a background image by increasing the text size and/or making it bold.
• If you want to draw a reader's attention to a word, product or service or heading, make it stand out by bolding it or making it a slightly larger font size. Don't type more than a few words in ALL CAPS, as even though they will draw attention to the word, they will lose the effect, since everything looks the same, so none of it looks important.
• Don't underline words if they're not links.  On the web, anything that's underlined is supposed to be a link. Readers will get annoyed when they try to click those underlined words only to discover that they're not really links. If you want to emphasize something, bold the word.
• Never use more than one exclamation point! Rather than conveying urgency, multiple exclamation marks really scream "Amateurish!"
• Spell check!
• Don't make your page too wide.  Your page should be 770 pixels wide at most (so people with 15" screens can read it). If your pages are wider than that, then most readers won't be able to see everything without scrolling to the side.
• Make your text large enough to read.

Is it time to get a new website for 2012? Speak to TA Fastrack today for more details.