Website Design & Usability – What to Avoid

These can show how few people bother to visit your website. If you really need to know how many people visit your website then arrange web traffic analysis reports with your web hosting provider. If your hosting provider does not provide this service you can still find another company to run reports for you, based on the log files stored by your hosting provider. (Although this can vary from company to company).

Large images that get in the way of content. Images should be there to sell a product or enhance and support the messages you are delivering in your web content. Don’t make people scroll down to get any useful information from your website. Be mindful of people viewing your website in 800x600 screen resolution. It gives them less screen real estate so everything appears larger than in say 1024x768.

News sections where the most recent article is over 12 months old. News is supposed to be ‘new and recent’. If you do not have enough ‘new’ information to share on a regular basis (every few months) then maybe don’t bother putting up a News section. Any news worthy information could instead be included in your ‘About Our Company’ section or on your Welcome page if appropriate.

This also applies to ‘website last updated’. If your site was last updated in December 2001 it’s probably not a good idea to tell people!

I am sure people put these up with best intentions of putting some content there at some point in the near future, but it seldom seems to happen. Instead, take a phased approach to your website and only put navigation on your site to pages that actually have content. Yes it may cost a little more to get buttons added in later on, but at least your site will appear more professional for doing so.

Don’t forget to check your email Inbox for enquiries on a regular basis. Checking your email and responding 3 weeks after an enquiry has been received is unacceptable to the majority of the population. There is nothing worse than completing an online enquiry form and never hearing back from the company.

Remember that the web is a different environment to print. So don’t try and replicate your brochure exactly online – it may not work.

I am sure you would be horrified if you printed 1,000 brochures to discover numerous spelling errors. The same applies to the web – get someone to check your spelling if it is not your strong point. Make sure words are used in the right context and that the copy makes sense when read. Thousands of people can visit your site in a day, week or month so the impact of spelling errors can be just as damaging to your company’s image as errors in print.

Don’t force people to download software or plug-ins to browse your website unless this is integral to the content or objective of your website. If your website uses Flash give people the option to view an HTML version instead. HTML is more easily accessible by the majority and faster to load. Some people just want to find information quickly and are not concerned about the ‘grooviness’ of your graphics.

If you are going to provide links to other websites, please check these links are still working on a regular basis. People may change their page name or remove a page you are linking to and in most cases you won’t know about it. Broken links can give your site the appearance that it is out of date.

Alt text has a purpose. That is to provide those that can’t see/read the images with information about those images. A search engine optimisation technique is to include key phrases and key words within your Alt text to help rank your site higher in search engines. Please if you are going to do this, ensure a balance between providing helpful information for users and using alt text as a tool to rank better in search engines. There is a call centre company that could win an award for the largest alt tag. Click here to view the screen-shot.