Things to consider
Fortunately, the most common website mistakes are very easy to prevent or fix. Our list of website design tips below will help you do just that. In the coming months I will expand on web design and the different techniques and how each have their avantages and disadvantages.
Make sure each page in your website has something valuable to offer.
This is actually more important than design. Most people think that if they have a beautifully designed website that people will like to come to it. Taking a step backward, remembering why websites are important to a business is that fundamentally, a web page exists to provide something that's useful or interesting to visitors.
Don't distract your visitors with blinking or scrolling text, animated GIFs, or auto-loading sound.
Animations and sounds are very distracting. They may seem cool at first glance but they distract the user and become extremely annoying. Animated GIF's and MP3 sound slow down pages, especially for people still on dial-up connections. Flash can be used tastefully but can really distract from content and bog down page load times. Search Engine spiders also have a tough time seeing into the Flash content for indexing your site. Conventional wisdom is that people will be drawn to an animated ad, but it's actually the opposite: Readers who are assaulted by blinking ads are more likely to leave the site immediately without clicking on anything, and are far less likely to bookmark the site, return to it, link to it, and recommend it.
Don't annoy your visitors with pop-up windows.
Nobody likes them and they are a waste of time and space. Users who come to a site with "pop-ups" generally get upset and leave and never come back.
Put some thought into organization.
Think about your content and how you want to portray your business online. You will do your readers a disservice if they cannot easily read and navigate through your site.
Limit page length to 2 page downs, or 6-7 pagedowns for articles.
While you should put a lot of content on each page to minimize clicking, you should limit the scroll down length. No one likes to keep scrolling forever and will loose interest.
Minimize clicking!
Keep clicking to a minimum to keep the information in front of the user as much as possible. Is your home page a splash page (a page with no meaningful information on it, that simply "welcomes" visitors to the site, along with an "Enter Site" link)? If so, get rid of it. After someone takes the effort to visit your site, get them to your site right away! Don't make them knock on two different doors.
