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read moreIn today’s day and age, technology trends seem to come and go faster than weather patterns. What you thought was a cool feature on your website a year ago could be a faux pas at this point. Web design trends change, and certain functions or design aspects that were once considered state-of-the-art are now obsolete. If you want your website to perform optimally, consistent updates are a must. Below we have provided a quick list of web design faux pas that will quickly turn visitors away from your site, and that’s the last thing you want.
Design
Avoid ornamental fonts
While ornamental fonts may seem aesthetically pleasing at first glance, they quickly become annoying and hard to read. It may seem basic, but it’s extremely important to choose an easy-to-read font for your website. The last thing you want is for a potential client to immediately turn away from your page because they can barely read the font you chose.
Don’t use too many colors
While it’s always a good idea to breathe some life into a website with some catchy color schemes, it’s important to remember that too much color is a bad thing. You don’t want the colors to draw attention away from the content on your website. Or even worse, you don’t want your website’s color scheme to cause a visitor to immediately leave the site because of dizzying contrasting colors.
Avoid requiring visitors to watch an “intro”
Picture the last time you had to watch an intro video in order to visit a website. Chances are, you probably searched for the quickest way to exit out of the intro video right away. It’s important to recall the negative aspects of websites that you see in your personal life. If you do this, you will be able to look at your website objectively and try to make it as user-friendly as possible.
Functionality
Keep it simple
This means don’t do the following things: overuse Flash, require registration and include broken links. These are all very basic pieces of advice that any web designer can easily do. If your website currently has any of these features present, either contact your current web designer and ask for a change, or look elsewhere for help.
Content
Don’t overuse advertising
If you have too many ads on your website, it can make a bad first impression on new visitors. This is because it may look like you are willing to do anything for a few extra dollars, even if it means compromising the integrity of your website. Additionally, even if you do only have a few ads, placement is very important. Make sure your ads aren’t placed in areas that distract the reader, like in between paragraphs.
general advice
When choosing your domain name, don’t make it unnecessarily long or include any irrelevant words. This takes away from the legitimacy of your website and it can confuse users. We’d advise against purchasing domains with too many keywords as Google devalued exact match domain names as of September 2012 to prevent low quality sites from ranking well solely for their names.
Also, make sure to include links to your social media accounts on the site. And here’s the big one: don’t ignore search engine optimization. Reputable web design firms will be able to help you with this, and it will drastically boost the Google Page Ranks for your website.
We hope this blog post provided some food for thought. How many of these website faux pas have you encountered (or committed)?
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