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Designing a website is not an easy task. All web designers and developers realize the importance of usability of their site, if done well. Websites with easy features and simplicity offers a great experience which leads to happy customers.

Here are some major mistakes a web designer may commit while designing a website and the measures to avoid them :

Failing to state clearly what the website is about
When someone visits your site, you have no more than seven seconds to let them know what the site is all about. It is a huge mistake to get visitors read through several pages to figure out what the website is about. The longer time they take to understand what the site is actually for, the more are the chances they will leave your site and find what they are looking for somewhere else. This poor website design may cause your visitors to leave never to come back.
Consider an uncomplicated way to have simple but clear and precise tagline or headline, located at the top of the webpage that exactly states what the website is all about. When people start reading, they start from top left to right. So, it is preferable to have your headline placed near the top left hand corner of your web pages.

Unreadable text font, color or both
As font sizing is the most glaring error in Web Designing, you should use right font size. There is a ton of information online and your visitors will only spend a few seconds on a site unless you are able to get them engaged. Going overboard with creativity of font can create difficulty for visitors. Unreadable content makes the visitor to leave the site early.

Pick font and font colors that are legible. You can use fonts like Arial, Verdana or Times New Roman. When it comes choosing text color, try to use colors with contrast. It is easy to opt for black text on a white background or vice versa.

Too many graphics and images
Having too many graphics and images can cause your website to load very slowly. Because of too much loading time the visitors will get impatient and leave the site never to return.
So, it is necessary to avoid too many graphics and images if possible. If you want to add graphics, you should reduce the size of graphic as much as you can without distorting it. Don’t make your visitors suffer due to missing graphics or badly shaped images. Optimize them and keep in best formats with best widths and heights.

Not adding the page title
Good title communicates a lot of information to your visitors. Hence, you should not confuse page title with headline. Headline is located at near the top left corner of a web page that tells what the site is all about. The page title is text which appears in the very far top left corner of the browser window. The page title is important as it is the way through which search engine determines what the web page is about. Therefore, you should give web page titles that describe what is the content of the page.

Not telling the customer what to do next
Once the visitor knows what your site is about, never expect them to figure out on their own what to do next. Sometime it happens when the visitor like what they see but don’t know what should be the next action. If your goal is to get customers on phone, tell them to call you up. If you want to sell a product, then tell them how to add the product in their shopping cart.

You can use statements like, “Buy It Now” or “Click Here to Continue” with the help of action buttons, which indicate some action. Whatever the action is, tell them in a clear and direct way.

• Orderly arrangement with effortless navigation – The manner of navigating the links on a site ends up playing an extremely significant role in deciding the tackiness of the web site i.e. the period of time a particular visitor will stay to explore the site. Hence the first thing a designer should do is to ask him or her question that, what a visitor would do as just immediately after logging on to a site. Now, commonly, they would in all probability go through the content present on a given page and then maybe surf around a bit to come across any other material on other pages that might arouse their interest or catch their attention.

• Having a neat Layout Design: Deciding to go for a neat and clean layout that will probably use a large amount of blank space will most certainly enhance the appearance or look of a web site. However, one must still try and keep the content as one’s center of attention, something that can be aided a lot by making use of the dreamweaver templates. Another significant thing is to make use of common fonts that will probably be accessible on majority of computers so as to avoid the site looking absolutely ruined with half of the designing strategies gone down the drain.

• Making a design suitable for all types of Screen Resolutions: A user friendly web site will certainly always persuade the visitors to hang about and go through the content given on the web site. Now, if a web site has unnecessarily extensive pages carrying content, it can end up becoming a key point since it can result in reducing the total amount of scrolling that one will require. Now, in case the web site is not looking good for any one particular screen resolution there is high probability that a particular visitor will simply close the browser window thinking that the particular web page in question is prevented from viewing for them. However, designing stretch and extendable layouts which will fit on to any computer screen resolution without any problem or trouble will certainly make sure that the designer is aware of the fact that each and every visitor will be able to view a site which is both visually attractive as well as professional in nature.

• Use of simple CSS programming – A designer, above all people must realize the fact that the cyber world is gradually shifting from the times of the table based web sites to out and out pure CSS web sites primarily die to its set of advantages such as user friendliness, ability to reuse along with the fact that even the file size gets noticeably decreased with a larger command on the site’s appearance.

• Designing web sites with a low loading time – Irrespective of anything else, this is the most significant factor as well as a deciding one regarding the final success of a web site. Hence this is certainly the first guideline that all web designers must adhere to. One can certainly design a web site which has an absolutely extraordinary look, but with a long loading time, the traffic will certainly consist of a handful and the entire investment behind the appearance will go in vain. The designs must always be suitable for the net and ideally ought not to take more than a period 15 seconds for loading the page. One must always keep in mind that even if one might end up with a fabulously designed site, but if it requires an extensive time for loading each time, only a minority of the people will be able to view it.

• Crafting a simple and user friendly navigation – Guiding through the web site is one of the most essential tasks that a web designer has to keep in mind while doing his or her job. In order to carry out this task effortlessly, one needs to have a navigation system which is both user-friendly and also simple. Thus, a designer has to ensure that each and every significant links are placed at prominent places on the pages preferably on the top of the page since that's typically the location which capture’s a user’s attention in his first look above all other places. Having menus on both the sides of the pages is another important strategy along with relevant links embedded to all the likely pages of the site. This will allow the information or content to be easily reached from each and every parts of one’s site. After all it’s not possible to know the interests or tastes and preferences of each and every individual user. Thus to try and make use of the footer highlight the important links can also be a beneficial idea.

• Using fonts that are both legible and proficient – many users around the world complain of logging on to a site and then immediately logging out simply due to the use of an in adept font or irritating color combination. The application of such fonts and color combination immediately given an impression of incompetency. Thus use of bizarre fonts which cannot be accessed by most just for the sake of looks must be avoided at any cost. Because, if s font is not accessible by a visitor in his own PC, the web site will end up using the default font of the computer which would be a shoddier case. Thus it is always the best possible way to try and stick to the ordinary and yet the professional fonts such as Arial and Verdana for these purposes.

Although, there is a general idea that goes around that web design or at least the recent boom about it is an absolutely fresh phenomenon, one must realize that the gradual developmental process through which it has emerged can be actually traced back to a considerably longer period of time. In fact, the most accepted argument in this regard proposes that the moment of appearance of the first web page should be starting point of the narrative of history of web designing. Hence, one can say, following the thread of this argument or theory that the history of web site as a whole as well as web design shares a common initiation point.

Now, as it has already become something of a common knowledge that in August 1991Tim Berners-Lee became responsible for publishing what is now deemed to be the first website on the internet. Among other innovations induced in the process, Berners-Lee became the first person to merge the notion of Internet communication which had been for decades delivering email and the Usenet, with that of hypertext which also had a decade of existence behind it, although restricted singularly to information browsing to be stored on one computer, like the instance of the interactive CD-ROM design and application. The sites used a particular markup language for the writing purposes called HTML, and the early editions of HTML were able to perform only a kind of a bare minimum level of function, thus being able to render the very basic structure of a website including the elements like the headings and the paragraphs, along with the capacity to use hypertext for linking functions and purposes. This fresh and novel form was unique and unlike the other existing forms of communicating. It allowed the users to navigate with no trouble by following hyperlinks from linking one page to another.

However, with the gradual development in the field and the technological progress regarding the Web and web design, it was the turn of the markup language to alter and become more and more complicated as well as flexible, hence giving the capability to attach objects such as images or tables on to a web page. An element like the table, though it was initially designed in order to be used for displaying information in a tabular form, soon were subjected to modulations for its avatar as an invisible layout tool. However, the table-based layout became almost outdated, as they are more or less considered to be now, with the emergence and development of the CSS or the Cascading Style Sheets. Further development of the database integration expertise like design standards like W3C and server-side scripting resulted in more changes and even enhancements in the manner the Web is constructed. However, with the progress of time as well as the developments of various programs, applications and utilities, the websites are hell bent on changing the existing code both on the inside as well as on the outside along with the visual design.

• Instead of putting in all the resources to make the site look fantastic, a designer must ensure that the loading time of the pages remain low so that t can reach out to a larger section of web users.
• The navigation strategy must be well thought out and crafted in a simple and user friendly manner to make sure that a visitor once logged in, stays and browses through the site without any trouble and in an effortless way.
• The site must be designed in a manner so that it fits well in computers with various configurations of resolutions. In fact to achieve this, the designer must make it a point to never design in terms of pixels but always in terms of percentage.
• Another compatibility factor of which a designer must always be alert about is that of the web browser. It might just happen so that while the site appears great on the Internet Explorer, it is a messy affair when tried on another browser such as Netscape or Mozilla Firefox requiring extensive trial and testing.
• Instead of going for using fanciful fonts and an out of the world kind of color combination, a designer must always try and use legible web fonts which can be also accessible by a user on his or her PC which is the basic target of the website.
• Keeping the web site sleek and yet in order is the trick of the trade. Since most are keen on content rather than style, it is useless to litter the page with massive images that will simply take forever to load.
• As already hinted above, simplicity can be the trump card in this business with minimal the use of graphics and a clever and smart use of the white space. There is a resultant sense of roominess along with efficiency with the use of white space.
• Broken links can be a great obstacle for the success of a web site in getting traffic and can turn into a nightmarish menace if not looked into properly. A site should always be tested for broken links before uploaded
• CSS has almost become a kind of a keyword for web designers for a variety of reasons. CSS websites are advantageous in terms of reusability, convenience and also significantly lowers the size of the file besides rendering a greater command on the visual appearance of the site in question.
• One must always try and use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever it can be possibly applied. Once accessed from the main server the SSI files continue to stay in the cache and thus on succeeding cases take less time to load.