Make Your Site User Friendly – Part 2 of 3

A continuation of what NOT to do on your site: common mistakes that I see daily during my work as I surf the internet.

Some people try to cram as much as possible into one page. If there is that much
information, another page should be made. No white space is as hard on the eyes
as bright writing and a dark background. Plus, what often fills the white space
is pictures, and pictures often take a long time to load. Few people will wait
longer than 5 seconds for a page to load.

Make sure your page is well organized. A messy page means people cannot find
links. It takes about 5 seconds for people to get frustrated and leave the page
via the back button. Make sure they can find what you want them to find in those
5 seconds so they stay on your site and buy your product.

I have come across many sites with terrible content – not necessarily just spam
(which should be avoided at all costs) but poor grammar and spelling mistakes.
If you speak English, don’t hire someone who does not to do your writing for
you, unless you plan to go back and fix all of their mistakes. Nothing detracts
from the professionalism of a site like a lot of useless sentences strung
together. Provide useful information, and people will return to your site.

Pop ups are probably the thing I hate the most, though thankfully people have
begun to realize that it annoys more than it sells. I make a point never to go
back to a site that does this to me. Especially the ones whose pop ups ask if I
would like to make their site my home page. If I wanted to, I would do it
without the pop up. The answer is always no.

I have seen some sites that are quite well organized, have a nice blue and white
color scheme, and then add a huge banner that’s bright red into the middle of
their page! It destroys the whole quality appearance of the site. Keep the same
color scheme over the whole site, or at the least, over the whole page.

Along with the color scheme comes the font. Use only one font, and make sure
it’s legible. More than one only makes the page look cluttered.

Some sites make their links bigger on mouseover, to show where the mouse is
pointing. The idea is good, but the method is flawed. Often when this happens,
the links get messed up, and move to a different line. This just looks tacky.
The best thing to do is change the background of the link text so that the text
is still easily readable, but it performs the same function as a larger font.