No Comments Written by Andrew Bonar on October 27, 2008 – 10:37 pm

There are lots of tips about how to make your site look great and stylish. This article take a simple approach on improving your sites design by showing you things to avoid.

As a web designer you should be designing your websites with its visitors in mind at all times. It is your job to create the best visual impression for sure, but more important is ensuring usability and ease of use. These elements combined create a welcoming user experience.

Do not underestimate how important your role is as a web designer, the greatest product in the world with the best marketing material and copy on a website that has thousands of visitors will suffer badly and not convert if poorly designed.

When I discuss good design, its not just about the graphics, there are many design elemnts to take into consideration. Any professional web designer will agree there are many components to good design.

The key areas are:
Accessibility, User Interface and Graphic design.

In the interests of the above, here are my top 5 things to avoid:

1. Using Frames

Frames is obsolete, trampled-on, beaten-up and highly disliked by pretty well every designer worth his or her salt. Back in the mid 1990’s (when dinosaurs still roamed the earth), frames allowed your site’s navigation and logo to be visible even as you scrolled down the page. This is because, depending on the frame layout, you could have your navigation and header in different frames.

The problems? Besides being ugly and confusing, frame-based pages usually only show the home page URL in the address bar, making your site impossible to bookmark. Search engines despise them - which frame takes precedence as the content to show up? Often, from a search, only the content from one frame shows up, stripped of the other frames, leaving no navigation or logo.

If that’s not enough to turn you off, using frames makes your site look like a decrepit old man. It’s just old, bad technology.

2. Playing music

No background music. If you must have music then ensure the user starts the whole audio process off by pressing “Play”. This applies to the currently in vogue and considered stylish “Site Tours” where some virtual person starts talking about the site or its products. Do not auto-start these tours or force a user to listen to music.

3. Silly text sizes

This is central to usability. Do not use excessively big or small text, additionally do not use fixed font sizes (the user should be able to adjust font sizes using the browser settings). Text needs to be legible, users should not be squinting to read your content or scrolling simply to read a sentence. Good content should be clear and easy to read.

Note: To use adjustable font sizes in your CSS styles, use EM, percentages or the “small” setting. Avoid pixel or point sizes.

4. Popups/New Windows/Breaking the back button

Popups are generally blocked by users in any case, and there is very little good reason for them. Most pop-ups are for advertising, so users are put-off by the very idea, so even if it gets past a pop-up blocker, users instinctively close them.

IN any case popups break the ‘back’ button. Do not break the “Back” button, as this is a basic rule of usability, and will only confuse and frustrate your user.

5. Blinking Text

Nasty, just do no do it! It’s one of those html tags that somebody at Netscape thought was a good idea. Blinking text belongs to cheap, kitsch motel in a bad area of town. There is no excuse, I really do not think I should have to explain why, its a distraction.

So you can see there is a lot more to good web design than purely graphics, and I hope you appreciate why user accessibility and usability is important. My next article on usability and accessibility will explain in more detail and give you even more tips for running a successful site.