Web Design – Basic mistakes and simple fixes

I was recently asked to critique a friend's business website and was surprised to find the basic errors made by her business' web designer. I hope you can learn from their mistakes:

Colours:
The first thing that stands out visually about a website is use of colour. This can set the mood of the site before anything else.  

• Avoid using washed out colours. From a mood perspective it's boring and from a fashion perspective pastels went out two years ago. 

• Choose colours that best set the mood you want for the site. Sometimes you are limited by a client's specs if they request company colours, but even then use them to your best advantage. If all else fails, go for black or white.

• Use contrasting colours for text and background. It's no good having white text on a grey background – users won't even bother trying to read it.

Images:

Photographs, logos, cartoons, etc. are there to provide visually stimulating points on your site. Make them work for you.

• Use only quality images. It is a poor representation of any business to have photographs that look like they were taken with a phone camera. Get a professional photographer if necessary.  

• Stock photography is a good alternative if all else fails.
  

• Make sure your images are big enough to be seen clearly and crop to suit.

Text:
Hopefully your website has content worth reading.

• Body text should be at least 12pt. If your demographic is 50+ then it should be 14pt.

• Keep the homepage as free from text as possible. People will use images, menus and links to navigate to text if they want to.

• Use a font that is available on most browsers. Sure, Mistral looks like handwriting, but IE can't read it so nearly 50% of your viewers will see rubbish.

Copy:

This is the actual wording of your site. 

• Proofread. A typo, misspelled word, poor punctuation, incorrectly placed apostrophe... All these things can lose you credibility with a reader.

• If your client provides the copy, proofread for them. If you find errors politely point them out to your client and ask if they'd like you to correct them.

• Make sure the wording flows. People typically skim through page text so make sure it's succinct and easy to absorb. 
  

A little bit of extra thought in the design phase can save time correcting errors after completion. Your websites will be more successful, business will be better... It's not rocket surgery but it's easy to forget.

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