Website design is extremely important to sell your products and services. If you do not design your website well, you will not only sell less, you will not have visitors. It is important to have a good SEO, search engine optimization integrated into your website design as well as good placement and attractive graphics. Here are many things that you need to avoide when designing a professional website.
Let’s take a look at the various elements which give your site that unprofessional, amateurish look so that you can avoid making these same mistakes.
Background music: Only a select few sites can pretend to have background music on their page. There’s nothing more shocking than having some loud electronica playing when first entering a website, especially if the music is ‘out-of-beat’ with the contents on the webpage. So, unless you are designing a website for your favorite nightclub, it is best to leave out tracks that are too loud. In some other cases, soft-playing music can be beneficial in making a great website, as long as the music does not repeat from the beginning when a page is switched over and as long as the user is able to turn the music off at his or her own wish.
Animated Gifs: I was hoping to skip this subject entirely, but I’ve noticed that they are still being used in a lot of website. Let me be clear on this once and for all: animated gifs epitomize everything that is considered amateurish and unprofessional in the web developing world. They can find solace in a teen blog and other low-key websites, so think carefully about using them in your next project.
Low quality images: Using low quality images in your site can negatively affect the overall look of the site. This can convey a strong sense of carelessness to the viewer, something that will be very hard to put with. Therefore, when you are looking for images to put on your site, try to make an accurate selection in one of the free sites such as Sxc and
Freefoto. And if you don’t find anything, think about making a small investment for your images: on this site, for instance, you can find some beautiful and professional looking set of images.
Images taken from google: Same as above. A great image can make or break a website, so why not pay some attention while making a selection? Your client base needs to be adequately represented using images that are trendy, gorgeous and truly original. Furthermore, a large percentage of images found on google are copyright protected, so using them might be problematic
Visitor Counters: The need for displaying the number of visitor on your website is quite pointless, and it can be detrimental to your website’s image and status if you have a very low number of visitors showing on your newly created site. There are many ways to keep these statistics hidden from the people visiting your website.
Out-of-style trends: Some graphic elements that were acceptable 10 years ago include: 3d buttons, shadows, glowing lights, and the now-popular round in-relief effect.
Don’t stay clinched to fading trends and styles. If you want to develop a quality website –that appeals to the public – you must build on your previous projects and stay up to date with the latest trends, otherwise your work might not be given the full credit it is due. Specifically, you should try to avoid the following:
- Shadows under the text
- Glowing buttons that can have an exaggerated 3d effect
- Effects in relief or embedded
- Excessive shading: A color shading scheme, which includes a wide range of colors passing from purple to acid green is not the best choice. This is evident even if one is not a professional graphic designer.
Colors are important in a website’s design. Then why does one still happen to find pink text on a green background? Here one must rely on good taste, as well as following a general rule of thumb. Your graphic projects should have monochromatic colors or colors which complement each other. Try to avoid using haphazard color arrangements, adopting colors that don’t follow any sort of logic reasoning. Do you want to learn more? Then you should read this article.
Relevance: When it’s possible, make sure that each graphic element shares an affinity with the project’s main theme. For example, a background made up of flowers is certainly an appropriate background to use for a flower shop website. However, if this same background was used for a fishing website, it would feel definitely out of place. The graphics of a website allow you to convey the key concepts behind a website to other people, so it is best to have a set of graphic elements (images, colors, icons) which can blend in with the main concept of a website.
