Common Webpage Design Mistakes

Ryuzaki

お前はもう死んでいる
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I wanted to call extra attention to this article: http://blog-en.tilda.cc/articles-website-design-mistakes

It provides a picture-based journey through all of the problems you tend to see on websites that simply "don't look right." I see it all the time when people who don't know what they're doing try to edit their themes, or get added from amateur plugins. It's nearly always based around crappy CSS, but a lot of it has to do with basic grade school level design concepts too.

Here's an example of the kind of pics you'll be looking at:

UP3LGzf.png

I'll provide a list below of what you'll find on the page, but you'll have to click through to see the images.

Landing Page Problems:
  1. Content is not broken down into logical blocks
  2. Uneven spaces between items on a webpage
  3. Padding so small means users can't break down content into logical blocks
  4. Avoid low contrast for text copy on an image
  5. Too many font styles on one page
  6. The colour block is too narrow
  7. Too much text copy inside narrow columns
  8. Too much centered text
  9. Text copy is superimposed over an essential part of an image
  10. Misusing visual hierarchy
  11. One logical set is split into two
  12. The title is too large and long
  13. Wrong use of border styling for buttons
  14. Using too many colours
  15. Overloaded menu
Article Design Problems:
  1. Long, solid copy (wall of text)
  2. Headline is positioned at the same distance between previous and next paragraphs
  3. There is no logical order
  4. Different padding above and below blocks
  5. Caption is positioned too close to an image
  6. There is too little space between subhead and text copy
  7. Stand-out elements are placed too close to the main text
  8. Low-contrast elements
  9. Colour background for a narrow text block
  10. There is an empty space between two full-screen images
  11. Too many design accents being used
  12. Too many typography styles
  13. Centering text in a long article
  14. Headline appears too close to the image
  15. Using italics when they are not needed
  16. Blocks appear out of place relative to the centre of the page and each other
I see a lot of these all the time and it kills me because so many of them could be fixed with a rudimentary knowledge of CSS or even 10 seconds of looking at it and asking if it looks good or not. Imagine that you're trying to convince a user to trust your content or to buy your product, but your site looks like you don't care. What does that say about your content or product?

I guarantee simple things like this are hurting conversion rates across the internet marketing ecosystem everyday, all day.

If you intend to do any design work (web page, photoshop, literally anything), or you write, edit, or post content, then I recommend taking a quick read of this post. There's not a lot of text and you can get the point of each item just from looking at the images.

If I had to say, the main problem I see constantly that screams amateur is padding problems. Typically, if I see a site on the net and realize it's some SEO's site, I can look at the footer, sidebar, or really any where and see at least one instance of horrid padding problems where they tried to edit something themselves and ruined it.
 
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