You’d think that the most common web design errors these days will be a couple of items missed by amateur website owners, since there is now a wealth of newbie-friendly tools as well as at least a decade’s worth of best practices handed down. However, the truth is that there are more than a couple of items in the list of most common web design errors, and that they are committed even by experienced professional web designers. If you’re worried that your website contains one of these design faux pas, check out the following:
Lack of a Search Box
Many webmasters these days make the mistake of forgetting to include an on-site search box (or put it below the fold), because they expect every visitor to come to their site through the search engine for specific pages in their site, which unfortunately becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the users just go to their site, visit one page, and leave resulting in a high bounce rate (which negatively affects their ranking in search engines as it implies that the users are not engaged or didn’t find what they were looking for).
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The truth is that big sites are already labyrinthine to the average user, and the only way for a user to efficiently navigate the site for what he wants is through a search box. After all, very few people have the time or the inclination to click every single category and every single post in a site’s archives just for a single page when it is much easier to close your website and try again on another person’s (much better designed) site.
Poor Legibility
This seems like common sense – text on websites are meant to be read, but somehow many designers get so caught up in the visual aspects that they tend to forget that certain types of fonts are difficult to read unless enlarged, especially if paired with specific background colors.
Poor Navigation
This one also stems from many designers being too engrossed with all the cool looking things they can do with a website, forgetting that looks should not supersede usability. In some cases, navigation suffers – like a dropdown menu that automatically drops down on mouse hover, resulting in people finding it hard to browse around the page without accidentally bringing down the menu. Or maybe a disorganized list of categories where things that should be at the forefront are buried several categories deep. The best practice in navigation is that you have to try and minimize the amount of steps a user needs to take in order to get to the content he wants.
Unnecessarily Complex Registration Forms
If there’s a portion of your site that requires users to fill in forms (such as a contact page or an opt-in section), make sure that you don’t overwhelm users with too many required fields. Ask only for the information that you absolutely require and either leave the rest out or make them optional. There is a tendency for users to just forego registration if they feel intimidated by the amount of fields that they have to fill out.
Lastly, Failure to Test
This is easily the biggest mistake, as it is usually one of the easiest ways to catch mistakes that creep up on sites, even unintentional ones that aren’t included in this list yet. Test everything in your site, particularly from the perspective of your users.
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