As an avid reader of my blog (I hope), you would already know that web design is one of my passions. I’ve been learning about web design for the last few years now but I would hardly consider myself an expert web designer. There’s definitely still some way to go and I’m looking forward to increasing my knowledge.
One of the best ways to learn is to keep making mistakes and learning from them. Over the years, I have been making many mistakes in designing websites but have managed to learn from them and become better. I’m going to share some of those web design mistakes I made below with you so that you can learn too.
Not including a site search box
As your website grows, the information in it will increase over time. Someone may come to your site looking for a specific piece of content rather than just wanting to browse around. Including a search box makes it that much easier for them to find what they are looking for. If you make things easier for them, then they will find your site easy to use and will keep returning whenever they want more of the same information. WordPress, my favourite content management system, has a site search box already built into the system and you can easily integrate it so you have no excuse not to!
Too much text in a paragraph
If you grew up reading books like me, then you’re familiar with reading long blocks of text. I remember reading some of the old classics where the entire page is made up of just one paragraph!
But that’s not something that modern readers like to experience, especially when they are reading online. A website is not a book. A book can only have words, but when you’re creating a website, you can tell your story using various types of media such as video, gifs, audio and so on. Don’t think that the best way to communicate online is just text.
Even if you do decide to go with just text, please don’t put everything in one paragraph. The best way is to break up the text as frequently as possible to make it more easy to digest. A reader confronted with a big block of words is also going to get intimidated and may not even bother reading your content.
Disorganised content
You want your website to be easy to navigate and to provide a pleasant experience for the visitors. You want the experience to be intuitive, and you do not need them to spend time figuring out how to use your website to get what you need. A clear navigation is thus critical. The worse thing you can do is to implement what is known as ‘mystery meat’ navigation where you don’t know where to click to go to different pages.
Other web design mistakes to avoid
So here are some of the web design mistakes I’ve made so far and I hope by sharing them, you won’t experience the same problems as I did. How about you? What other mistakes have you come across? Share with me in the comments below and let’s get a good discussion going!
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