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Annoying Website Design (Part 2)
Inconsistent Design. This can include the look and placement of a navigation bar, use of fonts, headlines, graphics, and anything else that contributes to the site's look and feel. By keeping a consistent design from page to page, you instill a sense of familiarity to visitors. With each new page, they don't need to relearn how your site works or how to find things.
Violating Web Standards. Creativity is fine. But certain things are standard practice on the web, and users come to expect them. Like navigations bars along the top or side. Like identifying links with blue underlined text. Like buttons: if it's a button, it should look like a button, and if it looks like a button, it should act like a button
Don't invent your own unique way for a website to work. Your site shouldn't present a learning curve to visitors. Web visitors won't take the time to learn your unique take on web design. They'll just give up in frustration and head elsewhere.
Popups. Don't use popups when people hover over a link. People scan pages quickly, moving the mouse around without thinking about it. It's annoying when a popup appears because your cursor accidentally crossed the link. Everything grinds to a halt until you close the popup.
Such popups are useful on Netflix, but probably don't belong on your church website. Don't force anything on visitors, whether it's reading a popup or opening a window they didn't choose to open. Instead of putting content into a popup window, design it into the page itself.
Specialty plugins. Avoid web technologies that require visitors to download plugins. Most won't bother. (The Flash plugin is now standard on most browsers, so that one's okay.)
Frames. This is a design technique which, basically, involves combining two or three web pages to make a single web page (one for the header, one for the side navigation bar, one for the content--like the three panes common in email programs). Frames were common in the 1990s. But they present many problems today--problems for search engines, for browsers, for bookmarking, for printing. Don't use them.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Violating Web Standards. Creativity is fine. But certain things are standard practice on the web, and users come to expect them. Like navigations bars along the top or side. Like identifying links with blue underlined text. Like buttons: if it's a button, it should look like a button, and if it looks like a button, it should act like a button
Don't invent your own unique way for a website to work. Your site shouldn't present a learning curve to visitors. Web visitors won't take the time to learn your unique take on web design. They'll just give up in frustration and head elsewhere.
Popups. Don't use popups when people hover over a link. People scan pages quickly, moving the mouse around without thinking about it. It's annoying when a popup appears because your cursor accidentally crossed the link. Everything grinds to a halt until you close the popup.
Such popups are useful on Netflix, but probably don't belong on your church website. Don't force anything on visitors, whether it's reading a popup or opening a window they didn't choose to open. Instead of putting content into a popup window, design it into the page itself.
Specialty plugins. Avoid web technologies that require visitors to download plugins. Most won't bother. (The Flash plugin is now standard on most browsers, so that one's okay.)
Frames. This is a design technique which, basically, involves combining two or three web pages to make a single web page (one for the header, one for the side navigation bar, one for the content--like the three panes common in email programs). Frames were common in the 1990s. But they present many problems today--problems for search engines, for browsers, for bookmarking, for printing. Don't use them.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Add Your Own Thoughts. Please.