5 Ways Your Site May Be Screwed
In the eagerly awaited 5 Things series here is the eagerly awaited next installment.
If you have a website and you think it is great, love the colours and that nifty flash thingummy that the designer did for you and the funky noise that the links make when you mouse over then think again as your website may look great but really be screwed.
Yes screwed! S – C – R - E – W – E – D. I make my posts match the stockphotos so screwed is the word for today’s blog. Tomorrows image is sailing. Here is why it could be in a right old mess – or screwed.
1. Site Has A Flash Intro Page
There are (too) many websites out there with a flash intro page that people have paid a lot of money to flash programmers to design with clocks going through the percentage loading and cool images swishing around like a 18 year old at a debs ball.
What they don’t see is people hitting the back button as they just don’t want to wait. I know there is be a skip intro (you did get a skip intro button programmed right!) but that is another needless click. You are putting a big flash fire curtain curtain in front of your site with this.
I am not against flash and there are some amazing site that use it well and when used subtly it is awesome but when it is the main show forget it. So all you flash programmers don’t send me hate mail. Flash is great (well not if you have an iPhone) but it should be part of the experience not the whole one.
2. Smoke Signals Won’t Work
If your phone number isn’t on the top half of the screen with email address and other contact info (Skype, Twitter etc) then you are losing. My wife is a typical internet user. She uses it to find information and often it is just the phone number or email address. She doesn’t care too much about the menus, content or anything like that. She wants to get in contact. So many sites stop this happening. Many many sites don’t even have their contact details on the landing page (that banging sound is my head off the table at the stupidity of this). So pimp your contact details smoke signals are no longer used.
3. Loading – Beep Beep Beep
That superb 500 Mb scenery picture that looks so colourful takes an age to load – bang goes the back button. Keep your images web friendly. Scale them down. Browsers don’t need high resolution. With the advent of SLRs people are taking 10 megapixel photos and using them for their website as is and it kills the speed. There are plenty of free applications to help you do this – you don’t need Photoshop.
4. Braille
No not a website for the blind (but it is a niche for speaking text). As I approach my 30s (OK 50s) I find it harder to read small text and if truth be told I lose concentration if the text is in a colour that doesn’t stand out from the background. People are in love with light grey on white at the moment. I cant read it sorry. There is an excellent article in NetTuts on Typography on the Web that really helps explain this.
5. Persuasion
No not persuasive content but the novel by Jane Austen that I did for my Leaving Certificate. It bored me within an inch of my life. Long meandering text, the plot could have been summarised by “bored girls in countryside do nothing”. Don’t inflict this on your users. Spice up your page with some interesting images. The ones I use here are from free stock photo sites and look well and might even match the topic some times. I know a picture of Jane Austen wont get me digged to often but its he best I could
Related posts:
- 5 Items that Everyone Should Have on Their Site
- Content for Your Site
- Why You Don’t Need a Flash Website
- WordPress Demonstration Site
- How to Get Boatloads of Traffic to Your Site (aka Kidnap the Cat)
I couldn’t agree with you more strongly. Too many designers are more concerned with showing off their design skills (and their mastery of the latest Web tools) than with creating a website that’s readable and usable by its visitors, and that furthers the goals of the person, company, or organization behind the website.