Avoid Making These Critical Web Design Mistakes

Basic Web Design Tips For Everyone

There are more amateur web designers than ever before. You may think about web design and see that it’s really simple to work with. The problem with this notion is simple, you could easily make mistakes. If you’re not trained in the field of graphic or web design, you will end up losing out on the bigger picture. It’s very important that you avoid making critical web design mistakes. They can not only come through as an eyesore; they can end up causing your page to get abysmal traffic. Imagine spending a great deal of your focus on building up a website only to see it get ignored outright. If you want to ensure that search engines look at what you’re doing, then you will need to loo k into the world of web design with a new vantage point. The following are going to be mistakes that you should not make, regardless of what internet marketers may tell you. These are egregious errors that you shouldn’t chase.

Automatically Playing Videos and Sounds

This is a pet peeve for many people. Do not allow anything to play or have sounds as people hit your page. Even today, this is sometimes hidden behind the guise of web design. It’s not a good plan. People either don’t want to hear it, or will simply not have the sound on anyway. There’s no reason why you should have something auto-play. When you take away control from the end user, they begin to resent your site, and will not return. The goal of setting up a website is to get people to see it. They can’t see it if they are immediately hit with music, or videos that play. Not only that, this really slows down browsers, and part of the current crop of SEO is the speed at which pages load.

Pop Up Opt-In Forms Are Bad News For Web Design

This is rampant. More and more people do this, and it’s terrible. Even in the advent of pop up ad blockers, there are scripts that will blank out your page and will screen wipe your advancement. What that means is simple, you will land on a page and start reading the information, but out of the blue, the whole browser will load an in-line pop up ad. It will ask you a question and your goal is to close it out. However, in order to close out many of these, you’ll need to answer a question negatively.

For instance, you’ll see one of these and the choices you have to make will include a positive, and one that is negative. A question will be asked like, “Do you want more traffic?”, and if you say yes, you’ll be sent to a specific “lead” page to get more information and a marketing speech. If you don’t want to answer yes, you will not just get a “no”. You will see a decline that says something like, “no, I already have all the traffic I want”, and you’ll feel bad about doing that. Simply put, it’s a bad way to design pages. Don’t put in pop up opt-in ads of any kind on your pages.

Too Many Ads Above The Fold

The majority of people today are surfing the net on tablets, and smartphones. One of the most annoying thing to put in places where people read information is above the content fold. If you’re putting a lot of banners in place, and you have obtrusive elements for advertising, you will get a severe backlash. There is nothing good about putting ads above the fold for the end user. You will profit, perhaps, but you will also see a huge drop in the number of hits to your page. Too many ads above the fold will not help you gain any sort of leverage, and will only prove to drive your traffic down over time. Don’t make a page that is ad heavy, instead, find ways to monetize in another fashion.

Heavy Loading Images

You may have a perfect image that you want. You go to upload it, and you realize that it is taking forever. If your image is large, and your plan is to put the image on your page with code that resizes the image, you are going to be disappointed. Heavy loading images shouldn’t be front and center on your page. This is a bad thing. Optimize all images for 72 DPI and a file size that is manageable online. Even with high speed connections, an image that is too large, will not work well.

At the end of the day, web design mistakes are made often by people that don’t know what they are doing. Now you have at least a few hurdles to avoid. Good web design is simple, most often, so keep that in mind.

Here is a Free Online Image Compressor you can use.  It’s a simple online tool that compresses and shrinks image sizes for you however I recommend if you have a lot of images you should compress locally on your computer.

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