10 Top Mistakes Company Websites Could Easily Make and Avoid in First Place

January 7th 2010

company web design

If you run a business and you don’t live under the rock in this digital era, chance is your business has a website. If it’s your company’s corporate website, it may look ugly to the common ‘digital’ public standard and subsequently jeopardize your company reputation. Those mistakes sometime so obvious and very easily be avoided. Check the list below.

1. Inconsistency: This apply to web pages layout structure, navigation, from header or footer. To be less confusing web pages within a website should be consistent. You wouldn’t want your visitors thought they’re already sent to other website while browsing your website just because on some pages you use a totally different layout or navigation, different colors, different fonts or different logo graphic.
2. Too much animation (GIF or Flash): Truth is, animation (usually in GIF graphic format) on a website, when overly used, tend to distract and leave an amateurish impression to visitors. What about Flash animation, isn’t it cool? While it’s true when deployed & used properly, full blown Flash sites looks cool or some even spectacular, still when visitors visited a Flash only site, they rarely hang around for the file to finish loading (playing). When visitors see new one that’s fresh, they might watch it, but soon, they’re off to another website where they can buy something. Generally, if you’re selling anything online, lose the total Flash page and make the site accessible, usable, professional and trustworthy. The additional bad news is, Flash and especially graphics (animated or static) are not indexable by search engines whom practically blind of them. The soon they meet graphics data, search engines just skip the bitmap data found inside graphics for the next index-able data (that’s mostly text).
3. Non proportional image resizing: Not proportionally resizing image lead to a weird looking picture, either too fat (wide) or too thin (taller) than it supposed to be. When you resize a 2″ wide x 3″ tall image to smaller 0.5″ in width, you know that the height should equally be measured 0.5″x3″/2″ = 0.75″. Turn on that “Constrain Proportions” option in your graphic editor.
4. Use of large photos that supposed to be thumbnails: Big pictures when put on a web page will drag the overall web page’s loading speed down. Did you take the photo on your homepage with your new mega bytes digital camera and then slap it up on the website, maybe just dragging the corners to make it smaller? That giant photo (which only looks smaller) takes at least 20 seconds to load in my browser and I’ve already clicked the next link in my Google search results. Best practice is when you use 2 sets of size for each picture, one with smaller dimension for thumbnail and the other larger for the full sized picture. And you need to do this separately using a decent graphic editor (Adobe Photoshop, JASC Paintshop, Corel Photopaint, Picassa, Polyview, XN View, to name some).
5. Poor readability: Did you go through your font list for the weirdest fonts that exist, add neon color and then enlarge them? Don’t think visitors going to use their credit card on a site that drips bright colors in a mishmash of fonts. Beside, consider that most of your reader’s computers won’t have that weird font, so it doesn’t make sense to use it. Or does your web page copy is barely readable, the font color and page background color just similar. For ease of reading to your visitors, instead use a contrast text versus page background, use as many paragraph (new line) as many as you need to differentiate different thoughts or ideas, don’t use all capitalized letter as it’s just like you’re shouting your readers, use title that at least 1.5 times larger than your ordinary paragraph font size.
6. Monitor’s Screen Size: In general web pages cannot be too wide that visitors must scroll its mouse horizontally to read the content. You can pick either 760 or 960 pixels for your maximum width, which refer to 800 and 1024 pixels screen resolution used by the majority of computers. It’s not fun reading those long paragraphs by scrolling right & left.
7. Get rid of obsolete news: If your homepage has news or upcoming events and the latest one happened in 2007 or 2008, get it off your homepage. In fact, get “news” section off your front page as in fact no one updates the web site often enough. In case you ask, yes, we offer websites with ability to easily alter content by your in-house personnel.
8. Confusing navigation: Navigation (links) should be clear, logical and intuitive. If visitors can’t find what they want from your business website, they’re leaving. List down what pages you want on your site, try to organize or group them in a logical order.
Visitors first! Put the most important and used link (from your visitors point of view) near the top or as to allow easily seen. Put them on a fixed spot, usually horizontally (on top) or vertically (on left or right hand margin of your web page). Don’t change its location from page to page as to provide visitors a consistent navigation. Whenever possible try to highlight the current page visitors are on. Additionally put a breadcrumb (small navigation path of page hierarchy).
9. Lack of white spaces: A good website would and should have proper white spaces in place for visitors’ comfort & ease in quickly scanning for information they’re after. Packed of information placed in less organized manner, with less clear marks on their separation (i.e. not utilizing white spaces) could result in visitors’ loss of appeal in further reading while also cause visitors sore & tiring eyes 2x – 3x faster.
10. Nothing to say for your website update: Don’t be. Too few web pages in a website are not good for website ranking on search engines. To get search engines’ good attention, a website need to have a rather thick content and growing… So instead, what wanted are more pages with useful information, which all focus to one theme subject: what is the website content all about. Having good contents will encourage other websites to link to your web pages and so does encourage the search engines to score more for your pages.

As a full service web design agency, Duranos provide websites that easily add, edit, remove & manage contents, all done by an in-house personnel of yours with a minimum computer skills set (know to use word processor).

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