Biggest Web Design Mistakes

There are plenty of mistakes you can make in the world of web design and we are going to look at what we consider to be the top 10 biggest.

You may want to check your site for these web design mistakes right now, and fix them if they're there – otherwise you're going to annoy most of your visitors and driving them away from your site.

1. Too Many Ads

When you're trying to make money from your website, it's all too easy to try to fit in more ads than you really should, or start using ad formats that are too intrusive. If you've put a new ad on your site, go to your own web site and put yourself in the shoes of a visitor, and ask yourself honestly: is this simply too much?

2. Flash Introduction

It is not advisable to use Flash introduction on your website. You'd think everyone would realise they're a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don't seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don't be one of those people.

3. Plugin Overload

If you must use plugin, then you've got to keep media that plugins to a strict maximum of one per page: that means that if you're using Java then you can't have Flash or if you've got Flash, then you can't have a media player. It's not as bad to use the same plugin twice, however.

4. Unclear Layout and Navigation

Have you ever visited a website and found that you need to go through 10 steps to achieve just a simple task? Many websites, especially business sites, seem to suffer from this kind of "disease".

If people are emailing you to ask you how to do certain things on your website, then you need to improve your layout and navigation. Remember: if there are certain tasks that people seem to want to do more often, you should put them on the front page.

5. Unclear Linking

You might think it looks better to only show links when people put their mouse over them, or not make their colour stand out too much from the rest of the text, but it's not – while it might make the design look nicer, it makes it far less usable. You should use a clearly contrasting colour for links, and preferably underline them.

6. No Marking for External Links

There are two kinds of links: internal (to other pages of your website) and external (to other websites). For the benefit of your visitors, though, it's best if you mark external links, either by making them a different colour or using some kind of a symbol (a box with an arrow is the usual one). It's also good to make the external links open in new windows, so people aren't leaving your site altogether when they click them.

7. Unlabelled Email Links

It's a very bad idea to ever use a link that will send email (a mailto link) without clearly marking it with the word 'email'. If you just make clicking people's names send email, you'll annoy visitors who just clicked wanting to find out more about the person.

8. Broken Links

Another web design mistake to avoid; to check all your links regularly to make sure that they all still work. There's nothing worse than finding a site that looks useful, only to find that it hasn't been updated in years and none of the links work any more. Although a website does mostly run itself after a while, but that doe not mean that you can neglect the essential maintenance it needs from time to time.

9. Strange Fonts

As a rule, always stick to the most common web fonts: that's pretty much just Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. If you're using more obscure fonts, then most visitors probably won't have them – and the ones that do will find your text hard to read. The only time you should use non-standard fonts is in your logo or in headings, if they are displayed as an image.

10. Badly-sized Text

It's important to keep your text around the standard size (preferably just below). Making text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many visitors.

The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user's preferred text size. You might also consider offering buttons on your site to increase or decrease the size.

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