When you set out to maintain your website, it’s very important for you to look through the eyes of your customer and understand what they see. Sometimes it is as simple as the customer wanting to buy a clock, but you are trying to tell them how to build the clock.
Jacob Nielsen, is a profound web design and website maintenance expert. He has numerous patents in regards to web based applications, services and ideas and is well known in our industry. Occasionally, he will issue a Top 10 List for Web Design or Website Maintenance Mistakes.
Here are Nielsen’s Top 10 Web Design Mistakes. For more detail, go to his site useit.com.
- Bad Search — Stick to a simple box, which is what users look for, and make sure your search engine can handle typos and other common variants of search terms.
- PDFs for online reading — They break users’ flow and are hard to navigate. Save them for printing and convert your information to Web pages.
- Not changing the color of links users have already visited — Users need to know where they’ve been.
- Text that’s hard to scan — Add subheds and bulleted lists, highlight keywords, and keep your paragraphs short and devoid of fluff.
- Fixed font sizes — Let users resize them if needed.
- Page titles that have low visibility in search engines — Start with the company name or other most relevant few words.
- Any design that looks like an ad — Users will ignore it.
- Lack of design consistency — Users should know what to expect.
- Opening new browser windows — Users get confused (see 8).
- Not providing basic, up-to-date information, like your price lists or your menu — That’s what users want most.
My Thoughts:
- Bad Search – This is a no brainer to me…..just use something really simple, a single box and a search button. In many cases you need an additional program, plugin, or content management system to do this, but it’s worth it.
- PDF’s for online reading – The fact is that they move you out of the website. I like this concept and I believe that more clients should use this method of converting them to html pages.
- Change color on visited links – I believe that this makes good usability sense, but I have to admit that we don’t always do it. We could improve on this.
- Scanning Text – Yep, agree. I tell clients all the time when they are maintaining their website to ensure that people can read the text quickly and efficiently because humans won’t read all the text unless they are really engaged in the article.
- Resizing the font – Interesting thought. It seems appropriate now that the web is moving forward.
- Poor page titles – A big problem with SEO is that the page titles are generic, they really need to be unique for each and every page.
- Designs that look like ads…..yep they will ignore it, and so will I.
- Lack of design consistency – all the pages should have the same design, except for the home page, which in many cases will be formatted just slightly different than the interior pages.
- Opening new browser windows – never do this unless you are linking to an external website
- Not providing basic information – this goes without saying and it’s why you should be doing regular website maintenance on your website.
I’ve been with CMWD for 2-3 months now and have been using a maintenance plan for inserting some new ideas, cleaning up our SEO, and gen’l. maintenance. If you need some good ideas or someone to bounce your ‘net ideas off of, give them a call.