Sometimes, webmasters and designers can get caught up in their concepts and run away with them. Not all ideas are bad, but when it comes to websites, you want to follow certain conventions and make the experience comfortable for your users. After all, your users are the ones who will be spending the most time on your site, and elements that you might consider helpful or innovative might quickly wear out their welcome. Here we'll talk about three poor design elements that will turn users away.
Background music. Playing music upon entering a site and looping it is one of the most irritating practices in times past. Thankfully, these days the trend has mostly died out. However, there are still sites that do this, and it can annoy your users. It gets old fast, especially if the music starts over every time you click on a new page. Any sound effect that goes off when clicking a link or arriving on a new page should be avoided. Not only is it irritating, but it can startle the user and make them want to leave the site before they can reach their volume control. Needless to say, the same goes for autoplay videos. For music and videos, give the user control over when it's played.
Flash elements or excessive animation and GIFs. Flash is not exactly bad in small doses; however, it should be used sparingly for many reasons. Not only does Flash in excess irritate users – especially in the form of a welcome splash screen or the entire website being made in Flash – but it also can harm you as far as search engine optimization and loading times are concerned. Users with a slower connection will find it more difficult to load a page with a lot of Flash elements and won't want to stick around. Using excessive animation and GIFs can also slow down your website performance – and it's poor design. Animation should be kept to a minimum; leave the “blingy” backgrounds for old MySpace profiles.
Font size that is too big or too small. Making sure your users can read your text without straining is very important. You should avoid overly large font sizes even in headings because it can overwhelm the user. Conversely, you should avoid making the font too small so the users won't have to squint or strain to read it – or, worse, give up and leave your site. Test different font sizes until you're comfortable; generally, a font size between 11 and 13 points is ideal.
Even if you aren't designing your own site, these tips will help you when coming up with your concept and a checklist of what you want. You can consult a web design company, like Codank Web Design, to further advise you in your site concept and design.
About CODANK Web Design
CODANK is a top rated Web Design and Internet Marketing firm located in Charlotte, NC. We are dedicated to providing the highest quality, cost effective custom software development services, delivering a broad range of business consulting and outsourcing services.
For more information, visit us at www.codank.com
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