Web Design Mistakes – How to loose valuable online visitors

There are many things web designers and especially the website owners feel ‘cool’ but they can instantly annoy any users. Below are some annoying web design choices that can put a real negative effect on your valuable traffic:

1. Auto-play: As per independent surveys most of the serious web traffic dislike auto-play on ads and video. But even above theme tunes can be killer.
2. Animated Text and/or Graphics: It was the call of the day a decade or ago, but amazingly still we find websites with animated text and graphics. Scrolling and blinking text also are elements which make a website look cheap and will instantly harm it’s reputation. The people who don’t instantly leave a site with moving text will find it distracting and frustrating to use if you are trying to read the blinking or scrolling content.
3. Pop-ups: Very very annoying. These Flash overlays that float across the page are also pop-ups in the eyes of most online visitors.
4. Drastic changes of font and background colors: Have you ever noticed why the default color for HTML text is pure black, the background is set to white and links are in blue and underlined. Answer is simple these contrasting colors really help people read the content of a web page and quickly spot out links to other pages.Unfortunately many web designers just for the sake of becoming different start changing these colors drastically and ruin usability.

   With little knowledge about CSS, web designers can for example have a black background with white text on top. Not only does this make the website dark and depressing, it’s slightly harder to read. So it’s best to limit your color choices, especially when you factor in the images (and possibly advertisements) that will appear on your website. As a rule of thumb, the fewer colors the better.

5. Unorthodox navigation: Yet again, just to look different, why do we use strange and new navigation styles and techniques? It’s good to be innovative but remember, it’s all about visitors.
6. Slow loading pages: The longer you have used the web for, the more likely your tolerance for slow load times will have dropped below the three second mark. There is a tendency, especially among young designers and newer site owners, to load flash content, scripts, and lots of graphics in new websites, often making it difficult to load pages within a couple seconds.
7. Broken Links: One of the most common website problems is having links on your pages that no longer work. Nothing is more frustrating to users than clicking on a broken link.