In part one of this post, I talked about the first four mistakes of web design. Although there are way more mistakes than ten, I feel it important to just nail down the most common and most annoying ones. Trying to make this list took a lot of pondering on what I’ve seen, in my short time here that even jumps out to me as being incorrect. I also did some online research to find out what kind of things other people feel are large mistakes in web design. This is part two and it is numbers five through seven. 

          As we become more and more comfortable with the internet we also become more comfortable with the advertising on the internet. This is all those banners and all that flashing text that we now ignore. I actually read an article about it, and it’s called banner blindness. People actually ignore or don’t read or look at anything that appears like it could possibly be an advertisement. Internet users also close most pop-ups before they even load up, just out of habit! Keeping this in mind, tip number five is to make sure your text on the website never looks like an advertisement. This means no flashing text and nothing that is shaped like a banner. Visitors will not be looking at these areas. For more information on banner blindness look to my next post and I’ll go more into depth about it.

          The sixth tip I can give you is to tell you that spell check is a wonderful thing and everyone should use it. If you are designing a website and it looks fantastic, it won’t matter if you spell everything wrong and your grammar is atrocious. You don’t look professional and you definitely don’t seem educated. Even though it may be a typo or a common mistake people are unforgiving and judgmental when they surf the internet. Make sure to use that spell check whenever possible, correcting follies that may make your website look like you need to go back to middle school. If spell check is not available proof read your page manually to make sure you catch those little mistakes.

          The last tip for this post, number seven, is that you should always take care of your title, meta, and keyword tags. When you don’t do this your page comes up as “Untitled Page”. This is the default title for all your pages before you decide to change it. Doesn’t seem like a big deal but that it what Google shows in blue when you look something up. It is the title of your page. If you used the term “untitled page” as your search for Google, you will see all these pages that never received these tags. They are very important! They help you get noticed by the search engines and in turn your site will be found better and receive more clicks. For more information on other types of web design take a look at DreamCo Design - Web Design.

Categories: Web Design Tips