The Worst Web Design and Development Mistakes
Luckily, the majority of websites we use today follow most of the usability conventions set by experts such as Jakob Nielsen of http://www.useit.com. Although there are many poor sites, not many come into the sa
me category as these, hideously designed websites.
Overuse of Animation ( Text – http://www.lingscars.com)
Keeping websites simple is absolutely critical to its success. If a user is overloaded with information, they will leave and find an easier site, especially if they are looking at purchasing complicated car leases or insurance as with lings cars. With the amount of animation / small snippets of text on this site, it is hard to work out where to look and to focus your attention and therefore unusable in our opinion.
Solution: Keep it simple, follow simple navigation practices such as having main links in a column to the left and categorizing your pages correctly. A small bit of animation can be used for demonstration / marketing purposes but keep it clean and professional.
Overuse of Flashing Text / Multiple Colours – (http://www.aiseikai.or.jp/)
Text is meant to be read. Although having say one element of flashy animated text may catch the users attention, if an entire site is animated / flashy / multi-coloured then where do you focus your attention?
Solution: The best websites use up to 3 main colours or maybe slight gradients thereof. Use simple text for the majority of content and maybe use one element of highlighted / accentuated text to capture the focus of the user. Key rule: keep away from blink / marquee tags, no matter how tempted you are to use them!
Overuse of Advertisements – (http://www.arngren.net)
The general purpose of most websites is to provide useful information to the user whether it be product information, company information events or just gossip. Some people like to have a small advert alongside this useful information to make a revenue on the side which is completely fine. However, sites dedicated purely to advertising like this one will never get many visitors so the advertising is a waste of time.
Solution: Since the million dollar homepage, http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ which was successful purely from the idea being a marketing phenomenon there is no point in recreating this type of site as they are no longer interesting to anyone. Keep your adverts clean and simple, if they are interesting and useful to the user, they will click and earn you revenue in the process. If they are not, they won’t click no matter how hard you try.
Animated Textured Backgrounds with low contrast (text http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/)
This modern marvel hits us with usability nightmares from every aspect of the site. With a multicoloured, rotating rainbow gradient background and black text as the home page, (which is virtually impossible to read) an incomprehensible menu system and random clip art animations usability experts would have a field day with this one. On top of that, the whole layout changes on every page of the site, some less hideous than others but all individually worthy of this list.
Solution: Simple backgrounds with high contrast. Use black on white, white on black etc. Keep site layouts similar if not the same throughout, with a consistent menu system at the very least.
All of the above – (http://belladesoto.us/)
I am not sure if this is intentional but this one has to top the list. With a random mix of politics, humour, animated images, floating text, overlapping layers, this website has to be the worst of the worst.
Solution: web design preston and web design blackpool.
Tagged with: Web design