Your website is often your first window of opportunity when targeting potential clients. If it acts as your first introduction, you want to make a lasting impression \u2014 for all the right reasons. Creative and professional web design can make the difference between browsing and buying.<\/p>\n
With this in mind, it is important your website effectively combines usability and creativity. There are however, 5 design disasters that you should avoid at all costs:<\/p>\n
Flash based websites can look attractive, but many people are unable to see your site. If they don\u2019t have the right software, or it\u2019s out of date, your website won\u2019t show up. And there\u2019s no guarantee that they will download the software.<\/p>\n
More and more people are viewing websites on their mobiles and many of these don\u2019t have flash capability. It is important to bear all of your users in mind. Flash based websites also take a long time to load as they use a large bandwidth.<\/p>\n
Blasting music at your visitors as soon as they visit your website is a sure fire way to make them leave again. Before adding any form of music to your website you need to ask yourself if it is relevant. If your site doesn\u2019t have anything to do with the music, is there a need for it?<\/p>\n
Forcing visitors to your website to do anything \u2014 either making them register before they can view the site, or listen to music that can\u2019t be turned off \u2014 is the quickest way to make them leave again.<\/p>\n
Navigation is hugely important for any website. If your visitors can\u2019t navigate the website easily, and find the information they\u2019re looking for, they will look elsewhere. While creative and \u2018out there\u2019 designs make you stand out from the crowd, usability should always come first.<\/p>\n
Clear navigation is a vital ingredient. You need to guide your users to the all important call to action, be it signing up or making a purchase. Make life easy for customers with site maps and breadcrumb trails if you have a number of heavily embedded pages.<\/p>\n
Along with poor navigation, dreadful design and clashing colours are major reasons why visitor leave your website. Just because you use certain colours in your logo and brand identity, it doesn\u2019t mean they will always work as a background colour on a website.<\/p>\n
Consider how people are viewing your site. With desktops, laptops, mobiles and tablets, it is important your colour scheme is clean and crisp. Your website needs to match your brand identity, but also work for the web.<\/p>\n
Similarly with the colours used on your site, overly small fonts are a big turn off. While a smaller font may work for the smaller screen of a smart phone, it won\u2019t always work on a desktop. If visitors find themselves straining to read the small text on your site, the chances are they won\u2019t bother.<\/p>\n
It is easier than you may think to benefit from effective website design. It is also easier than you may think to lose out as a result of poor web design. Do your research and work with a developer that has your business in mind.<\/p>\n
Looking to drive sales through effective web design? Bird and Co Creative is a full service digital agency with an expert team of web developers specialising in business web design<\/a>\u00a0, CMS and ecommerce web design<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Your website is often your first window of opportunity when targeting potential clients. If it acts as your first introduction, you want to make a lasting impression \u2014 for all the right reasons. Creative and professional web design can make the difference between browsing and buying. With this in mind, it is important your website […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[518],"tags":[460],"class_list":{"0":"post-13159","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-webmasters","8":"tag-design-development"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}