Web Design Essentials - How To Avoid Throwing Off Your Visitors

Most web designers spend too much time trying to figure out what to do to keep visitors on their websites that they forget what not to do to keep them from running off to another website.

What NOT to do is just as important, maybe an even more significant aspect of web designer, than what to do. The moment a visitor views your website, it's up to you, the web designer, to make sure you designed your website in such a way as to hook his or her attention as long as possible.

Here are some tips on what not to do when designing a website:

1. Sound and animation overload
It's so easy to fall into the trap of, "Hey, I'm a badass web designer, I can design my website with sounds and flying animations!"

Many amateur designers think flashy graphics is all it takes to attract a huge following. NO! In fact, too much sounds and animation tend to distract visitors from viewing what they came to your site for - the content. So please, easy on the background music and flying colors, please?



2. Annoying pop up windows
If there is a list of 10 commandments on what not to do when designing a website, this should be put up as the first commandment of all time. Pop ups has got to be one of the most annoying inventions this side of the internet. Have you ever clicked on a link in a website and suddenly 50 different windows bombard your screen?

As a designer, forget pop up windows as a way of generating income on your website. They are unethical, and eventually you'll lose more visitors than you gain from them.

3. Image backgrounds
Image backgrounds speak of one thing - amateur. But having an image for a background also does something else other than distract the visitor from viewing the site's content: they also slow down the page's loading times, which is a big blow to your credibility as a web designer.

Successful websites have extremely fast loading times, like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. So take a lesson from these big guys, don't use image backgrounds and make sure your pages load fast.

Follow these simple tips and you should have a decent, fairly successful website in no time. Sometimes it isn't about what you do, it's what you don't do that keeps visitors glued to your website and that they keep coming back.