Keeping it Clean. How not to Turn Off Your Visitors.

The internet is an amazing and fascinating place of infinite scale. One of the few remaining examples of global co-operation and communication. Somewhere where we can express ourselves, meet, comment, sell, buy, or generally just hang out. We all have our favourite sites and places to visit, and they work for us because they are appealing. Sites you like or dislike are extremely subjective. Like anything, taste is down to the individual, but there are a few underlying principles in making a web design appealing to the masses, or to just a few. We will cover a couple of them here.

Don’t blind your visitors with flashing or blinking images or text, scrolling titles, animated gifs or sound. Unless done very, very well these should be avoided at all costs. All of these elements distract your audience from the sites message. At worst they annoy them enough that they leave altogether.

Web audiences scan pages, they don’t read them. So when a flashing banner ad or scrolling text keeps drawing their attention away from what you’re trying to say, the website fails. It’s like trying to read a newspaper while a small child is poking you. Not a good position to put your audience in.

Biologically speaking, the human eye is drawn to movement. So theoretically, a moving or flashing banner should attract the eye. While this is true, the reason for grabbing that attention is what annoys the visitor. On any web page, the text should be your advert. It should engage, interest and sell to an audience. Banner ads, and the scrolling text or other annoyances will always be that, annoyances.

In a similar vein, avoid using popups at all costs. Nothing annoys web users more than unsolicited popups. As a website owner, you may be more interested in making money than engaging an audience, but the kind of ads are going to quickly drive traffic away from your site. You aren’t going to make money with no visitors. As a web designer/owner you have to put yourself in the shoes of the audience. See things as they would see them. Try this on a site with popups and you will quickly see why they are a bad idea.

The last piece of advice I’m going to share today is to not use images as backgrounds. It doesn’t matter what quality picture you use, it looks cheap. If you are considering using one in a design, firstly, don’t, but surf a few of the most popular sites you know and see what they are doing. They don’t use them do they?

Design is all about doing things differently and making something stand out, but that has to be achieved the right way. Using images as a background isn’t one of those ways. It looks amateurish and practically screams “home-made site” or “low rent”. Not only does it destroy the appearance of a site, it also slows it down. Even with broadband, loading up a background image can take a while and certainly isn’t worth the wait once it’s loaded. MySpace may be able to get away with it, but as useful at the place is, an example of good design and usability it isn’t.