Web Design Mistakes – Top 5 Tips For an Ugly Website

Filed in Discussion, New Websites on Jun.09, 2010 By Keith Lunt

It is all too easy to make a few mistakes and to create a very ugly website. Here are my top 5 tips for creating a truly ugly site. Avoid these at all costs!

1) Do not bother to check that your new creation works in other web browsers! Just make sure it works in Internet Explorer.

Even just testing in your new website in one version of Internet Explorer alone is a recipe for disaster. The different versions of Internet Explorer can, with certain code, all render the website page slightly differently and all slightly differently to Firefox. Yes, half of users (in my stats) use a flavour of Internet Explorer, but about a third of visitors to my sites are using Firefox. So you really do need to check that the site works well across a wide variety of browsers. Fail to do this and large segments of the page can vanish or drop away from where they should be.

2) Design your website to fit on a wide screen monitor – 1920 X 1200 would be a great idea!

I do not know why people with widescreen monitors assume everyone has the same, but in my stats a quarter of all visitors use a 1024 X 768 “normal” size monitor. If your design is based on fitting a widescreen monitor, then those with smaller screens will have to scroll up and down as well as left and right. I have seen it too many times and it is highly annoying, looks ugly and causes me to leave the website in seconds!

3) Have a different layout for every page of the site to keep visitors on their feet. They will love the constant changes and movement of navigation.

It might look clever to have lots of different styles to the pages, but as a visitor it does not give a good feeling. The lack of consistency across the pages mean that the navigation can be moving and hard to locate and each new page style effectively feels like visiting a new website. And this effect is horrible.

4) Remember Hogwarts and make sure that every possible image moves, banners spin and there are snow flakes falling down the screen. Oh, and have the mouse leaving a trail of stars.

One or, if you really have to, two moving images may add to a website. But when you start getting carried away there are so many distractions around the screen you do not really know where you should be concentrating on. The same with fancy falling bits to the screen and your mouse leaving trails of bits.

5) Save time going live and do not bother to proof read your work. Visitors won’t mind all of the errors.

When you have finished your website you must look through it and check that all of the text reads as it should do and, equally importantly, that it all fits as you expect it to. Something in the text could be too wide and pushing the layout out, or insufficient text not padding out a block which leads to chaos with the rest of the layout.

Just a few thoughts for you to be starting with!