Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

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Over the last many years that I have been browsing I have always liked some page designs and not liked some. What are the key mistakes that web page designers do when they come up with pages are summarized well in here. Give it a read.

So what are the top mistakes and what do I think about them ... read on below

1. Believing people care about you and your web site - I do agree to a large extent that your visitors at your web page are looking for a solution to their problem (whatever that might be) at your site.
2. A man from Mars can’t figure out what your web site is about in less than four seconds - As a website designer I think one of the most important aspects that you need to figure out is 'what do my viewers want' and 'what they might want'. Agreed this is not science, but put your best judgment and ensure that all the items in the definitely want category can be assimilated by visitors in less than 4 seconds. It should also give a good picture of what your page does. My example for this would be Google - My hunch is 90% or even more of the people who visit www.google.com want to search something so that is the prominent thing on the page. But yes you as Google might also want then to go to GMail, Google Docs etc and so they can take a much less important space on the page.
3. Mystical belief in the power of Web Standards, Usability, and table-less CSS - I don't build web pages but I build other software and the situation there is the same. Skill in using any technology (the bleeding edge ones included) for building a page is simply to be able to project to the business user what impact it will have on him - will it increase revenues, decrease costs, get more customers, retain customers better etc etc.
4. Using design elements that get in the way of your visitors - Golden rule of making a sale at work - "Never do anything that gets in the way / delays a sale"
5. Navigational failure - My suggestion here would be to make a flow analysis of how users can get to different points on a page. At every point users are more probable of taking some routes than the others. The more probable ones should be available more prominent and handy as compared to the navigation via less traveled routes. Definitely web pages should find a way of collecting this route information and make necessary modifications on a continuous basis. Case in point is the recent change on the Google Mail page for replying to an email. Earlier one needed to go to more options and then reply which I guess users found it problematic (at least I did) and bang came in the change where you can now reply directly as your read the message.
6. Forgetting the purpose of text - After all the barrage of multimedia on several web sites I think that it is time we moved back to a simple text approach. Simply put suggestion would be - add any pictures, video and all the jazz if required by your visitors and not for any other reason
7. Too much material on one page - The only thing too much material on a web page can convey is that you as a designer don't know what your user definitely wants and what he might want. The signature on Gina Trapani's page conveys it all about the fight for brevity - "If I had more time I'd have written a shorter letter". Translating it to web page design one would probably say "If I knew my visitor better I'd have created a cleaner page"

There are a few others that are discussed on the original post here. But as a 'user' I think the ones I have mentioned above are the key ones.

Tags: web page design, design, webpage