What to Avoid in Web Design

A poorly done website will serve only to drive visitors. As a web designer you should be devoted to quality- ease of use and an impression of a well done/coded piece of work. It doesn't matter if you have the greatest services/products on your website-aesthetics leaves an immediate and lasting impression on a visitor. Even one sale will not be possible if this sort of behavior is exhibited by most of the visitors (as is to be expected). A lousy design will drive away prospects.

A "good design" does not always mean a great graphical design. A professional web design will be able to point out that there are many parts to making a very good website design (user experience design, accessibility design, interface or layout design, user experience design and of course the most straightforward: graphic design).

Thus, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs that I have observed. Hopefully, you will be able to compare that against your own site, sort of like checklist. If you get any checks, it is time for some serious redesign.

1) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth a user's attention, and so are just closed on instinct every time each one manages to pass through a popup blocker (yes, many users out there use these handy tools!). Your website loses its function immediately since people will close the popup right away, no matter if it may contain some important message. Just imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen.
2) Extra large/small text size

You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized (and appropriately colored to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the website's content is, if it's illegible you won't be selling anything! There is simply more to web design than just graphics - user accessibility is important too.

3) Background music