You have a website, and you want to make it user friendly. But you don’t have a great deal of knowledge in this area so you entrust your design to a small outfit that doesn’t cost too much and seems to have a few examples of their work out there, taking up space on the Internet.

After a few weeks of your new site being up and running you take a visit, and your jaw drops. Overnight, seemingly, the site has undergone a massive transformation, and rather than being the beautiful, almost minimalist work of art you paid for, is now a clunky, garish beast that is probably turning away customers in droves.

This happens. And to help you stop the rot before it gets any worse, here are a few warning signs that your site is taking a nosedive. Whether you design your own site or get someone to do it for you, if any of this stuff is going on, you need to step in and change it.

The first bad idea is scrolling text or blinking text. Just, for a moment, try and remember the last time you saw a successful website that had lime green scrolling text running across the middle of the screen. It doesn’t look good and it turns people off. It basically takes visitors back to the 1990s, which was not the best decade for web design. If you see this kind of thing happening, do the decent thing and pull the plug.

Pop ups are another mistake. No one likes them. If you visit a site and the whole thing is full of pop ups, your first instinct is that the owners of the site want to sell you something you most probably do not need. In addition, pop-ups look cheap and nasty, like the site was created on a shoestring budget and needs to jump out at you to grab your attention. They don’t work, and they are a sure-fire way to lose visitors. Pop-ups basically tell visitors that they are not respected, that they are not intelligent enough to know what to focus their attention on.

Another killer is the use of background images. These are so old school it hurts. People do not want to see something that actually looks like it was created on PowerPoint. This stuff also destroys any hope of having a quick loading time, so avoid it like the plague.

The final really, really bad thing you can do with your website is to include page lengths that go beyond the single screen. To prove this point, there are thousands of spam marketers out there who, once they have you through a link, subject you to a four screen length web page that takes you through every single small detail of their ‘offering’, before hitting you with a price. If you respect your customers, you need to make sure you don’t look like you are selling an eBook on how to train dogs.

So those are just a few of the web design howlers that, if you want to be successful online, you will avoid at all costs.

Author Bio: Dave Matthews is writing on behalf of the Cheap Web Design Company, a UK provider of quality web design.

Category: Internet
Keywords: cheap web design, cheap logo design, web design, graphic design, logos, website