How to avoid three Web-Design disasters

A great website has become an integral part of nearly every business today. A terrific website offers your customers and potential customers the information that they need, services they find useful, and a reason to come back. Poor website design produces frustration and quickly causes customers to search elsewhere. There are a few disasters that will ensure customer frustration, and there are very easy ways to avoid them.

Slow Sites

Programmers and designers can do many pretty, fascinating things. And users with fast computers and great connections can enjoy those things very much. But more and more users today are surfing the web on the go, using mobile devices that often utilize cellular connections and don’t have the benefit of hefty graphic cards behind them. Your site has to be optimized for these users.

• Optimize all the images on your site. If an image will be displayed on a small area of the screen on your site, it should not be a big image that the browser has to shrink down to fit in the space allotted.
• Keep it under 100kb. Every page, including images, needs to be less than 100kb in size. If you use embedded content from other sites, this doesn’t count as part of the 100kb.
• Easy on the scripting. JavaScript, or AJAX, produces some great effects and can make your web page look really great… and when over-used can make your page really slow. Only use Java elements where necessary.

Incompatible Sites

In order to allow your site to be opened on as many platforms as possible, including mobile devices, there are some things you will need to forego. The most obvious things to lose are Flash and other plugins. HTML5 is a better option for interactive sites than plugins that will not be universally compatible with your users’ browser platforms. HTML5 delivers many of the features that plugins are used to provide, but the language is immune to the exploits that can be used with third-party plugins and it’s compatible with most every browser and platform, including iPad and other mobile devices.

Un-Navigable Sites

How deep is your navigation? Anything that’s nested more than a couple of layers deep, and isn’t available as an upper-level connection elsewhere, won’t be found very often. While it’s great to let your customers surf to precisely the information they want, having them get lost in overly deep navigation can be fatal. If a user has to mine down five layers to get to the content they were seeking, they may well get lost trying to navigate back out… if they have the patience to get that far in the first place.

The best option for navigation is to use something like WordPress. This delivers intuitive, clear navigation and also helps your site get indexed well by search engines.

Put It All Together

To ensure that the site that’s representing your business on the Internet delivers what your customers need wherever they want to access it, our professionals at VisualArtistics are available to review your existing site or help you through the process of establishing a new site.