5 Things You Should Avoid [#1]

5 Things You Should Avoid [#1]:

5 Things You Should Avoid

About webdesign!

As a webdesigner my motivation to live, is the vision of making the web a more beautiful place to surf. I’ve spend thousands of hours surfing around the web looking at great designs, smart navigation, and beautiful colour compositions. I’ve come up with 5 things you, as a webdesigner, should avoid in the build up of a standard website! They are listed below, and they’re all based on my own experiences.

1. Intro
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   Don’t use a startpage/beforepage for your website, it’s useless.
   Which function does it include? If it lets people choose if they want to see the HTML-version or the FLASH-version of your site, pack your stuff and start all over again. YOU choose whether your site is HTML or FLASH, not the visitor! Period.
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2. Navigation
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   Don’t try to come up with some revolutionary idea of how a website-navigation should look like. Place the navigation right in the middle, top, to the left or the right side.
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   Furthermore, don’t use dropdown-menus - they are waste of time, and people are tired of them.
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   By following this advice you utilize peoples navigation-habits, and your site appears more user-friendly (at least according to the navigation)
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   Two examples of bad bad navigation:
   The National Association for Child Development
   Brown University
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   If you really wanna explore the world of usability, you should probably read something by, the world famous (and Danish by the way ) usability-expert, Jakob Nielsen.
3. Colors
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   Don’t build extremely colorful websites. Choose one colorscheme of about 3-5 main colors. By that you increase the chance of building a clean and stylish website that’s worth looking at
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   There are tons of great colorschemes out there, I normally use Colorschemer or Colourlovers as useful and inspiring sources.
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   The colorscheme for this site:
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   NB: If you are afraid of your site getting boring because of a small amounts of (main) colors? Insert pictures and photographs, a picture says more than a thousands words…use that!
4. Crossbrowsing
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   Don’t make your website look sweet’n'nice in one browser (e.g. Firefox) while you let it suck in another (IE).
   Make your website look the same in all browsers, all people should be able to experience your site and have the same outcome of it. You should test your website in at least Internet Explore and Mozilla Firefox (More info on browser-usage here).
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5. (White)space & Proportions
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   Don’t ever think that you’re not allowed to use space, EVER! I think this is one of the most important things when you design a website. Use WHITESPACE and PROPORTIONS.
   It is so important to give the visitor a great experience when he or she visits your site, you can do that if you increase the amount of space (especially whitespace, if it fits your colorscheme of cause) between borders, text, tables, pictures whatever!
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   If you keep this in mind when designing, your site will not end up as a mess of fonts, pictures, colors etc. (e.g. like this site)
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   Good Bad
   

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That was a few tips and tricks, I hope you guys find them useful. If you want to see more of this, I’ve found a few lists which could be useful, cheers!
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