Where did Web Design Go Wrong?

Being an internet marketer and web designer, everyday I visit quite a few web sites on the net. The one thing that I found quite a lot of these sites to have in common, surprisingly, is a bad design. I ask myself who on earth designed this thing? The design is inconsistent across pages, some text you can harldy read because of the background color, and when I want to find something I can't because the navigation is so poorly designed. What the hell is going on here?

What I can't really understand is why this type of thing is so common. Web sites should be simple, text should be easy to read and the information should be sorted in a manner which is easy to find. Honestly how hard can this be? Being a web designer I know it's not hard, and so if it's not hard then again why is it so common? My answer to this is too many web designers out there try and do way to much. They are trying so hard to design a great website they are missing the whole point.

Take a look at this really bad website, now I'm sure you will agree this site has also missed the point yeah? This site is most likely overkill for my example, however what I am trying to say is keep your web site simple. It does not matter how cool your graphics are, how many people tell you how good your website looks, if users cannot find what they are looking for and pages take for ever to load, they will leave and I guarantee you they wont be back.

Here are a few key points I believe are needed for a good design and good usability:

• Simple, consistent design across all pages
• Well designed navigation that links to all the main pages of your web site, that exists on all pages of your web site.
• Good search feature if you have a lot of content
• Easy colors that make the text easy to read
• Consistent fonts across the site
• Fast loading pages

If you follow just a few of these you should be on the right track. Remember most people don't care how good a web site looks, for example I would much rather visit the worst looking site in the world that used my design principles above, then a state of the art flash site that followed none of them. Keep it simple.

Comments

[kev]

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