There are many reasons for website design mistakes, and they range from tinny mistakes to exceptionally enormous mistakes. Is your current small business website design committing a portion of these mistakes? The uplifting news is that they are really simple to keep away from or fix, as long as you are aware of what they are!
It’s no news that the future of exchanging information will be visual. In a present-day, website designers and developers who want to draw attention to themselves must know how to craft a visual message for the audience.
The problem is that when everyone starts making designs, the web gets flooded with low-quality visuals that not only irritate professional graphic designers but also annoy visitors with sufficient design knowledge to see the difference between a good design versus a bad one.
To assist you on a journey at creating your amazing visual designs-ones that will capture the attention of your audience and keep it-we’ve made a list of some of the most common design mistakes committed by amateur visual artists and non-designers.
Design Mistakes 01. Poor Readability & Legibility
We are aware that good readability is essential, but some designers manage to forget it in their outbursts of creativity. If you want your web design to draw attention, website visitors are going to have to be able to read it easily.
Having an appropriate amount of characters on each line is essential to the readability of the text on your web page. The optimal line length for your body text is considered to be 50-60 characters per line, including spaces.
Another measure to improve the readability of the text is to add enough spacing between each line. The considered perfect line-height is 150% of the font size you are using. For example, if you are using 16px font size, the line-height should be 24px.
Design Mistakes 02. Placing Elements Arbitrarily on Web Page
Poorly aligned web design elements are a clear sign of design mistakes made by non-designers. Amateur developers won’t pay attention to the suitable alignment of web elements and place them in various random positions. Randomly placed graphic elements or text within a design can make your website look unorganized and messy. Chances are you’ve seen some of the web graphic design examples that give you a similar feeling.
This is probably the most common mistake that the inexperienced web designers make in website graphic design and possibly the easiest one to resolve.
When working with graphic design, you should never place any design components arbitrarily. It is important to accurately align elements to create order and symmetry in the design. Using the principles of alignment helps to bind and unify all of your design items together into a strong, cohesive structure.
Design Mistakes 03. Not Creating Enough White Space
White space is by far playing one of the most important roles in the website design. The term “white space,” refers to empty areas between elements on your slides, regardless if it is white or any other color. It attracts the eye where you need it to move and prevents the page layout from looking overfilled and messy.
When there’s a lot of course content on the website, it can be very tempting to squeeze as much as you can into each section on the web page. I observe this problem a lot, especially with new e-learning designers that often are completely unaware of the concept of white space in web design. Therefore, they tend to stuff every inch with the content, so their website won’t appear empty looking.
Correctly using white space allows you to group similar web design elements to increase the influence of the message and keeps the text from crowding out the visual components of the website design.
Design Mistakes 04. Not Enough Contrast
Another one of the most common design mistakes that are associated with a not well-designed website is the inadequate use of color contrast. So that would be another graphic design element that you would want to pay attention to. It is one of the most common design mistakes often made by non-designers. Color contrast is the fundamental principle of graphic design. Our eyes like contrasting colors(also known as clashing or complementary colors). Color contrasting is a technique that web designers use to obtain the visitor’s attention.
Regularly, website developers will be using light, dark and bright colors to create color contrast in their graphic designs. If chosen colors and elements are too close in value, the website visitor eyes read it as secondary information or do not read it at all.
Design Mistakes 05. Too Many Font Variations
One of the most common website design and development mistakes is that inexperienced designers with a lack of graphic design knowledge tend to go to design extremes with the text by using too many fonts. This tends to present the message in a disorganized, thereby unprofessional manner.
Our Web craft station designers and developers suggest using no more than three fonts in any single layout.
If you require to make a typeface variation, the best option would be to make some changes to the same font. Of those possibilities could be maybe in Italic or Bold, as another option you could use different weights. Those font variations will allow you to achieve balance along with variation in your website design.
Design Mistakes 06. Not Choosing the Appropriate Colors
Colors play a very important role in website design and development process, be it through the selection of colors or their various combinations.
By placing the wrong colors together can lead images and text to look as though they’re dancing on the web page. Applying too many colors can cause similar visual confusion to your website visitor.
To be able to create an impressive website, web designers are applying a strong contrast between the colors, but this technique is something that has to be handled carefully. If the color contrast is inadequate, it can compromise the quality of the website design.
Design Mistakes 07. Using Large Text Blocks Instead of Visuals
Most of your website visitors will be looking to scan web page content in a fast manner to get an overview and then to decide whether or not to read it in its entirety.
One of the fastest paths to turn away your audience from your website is to cram all of your web page important information in a section that is supposed to be primarily visual.
Instead of jam-packing a web page with large blocks of text, try these few tips:
• Use different typefaces, styles, sizes, and colors.
• Add paragraphs and break large chunks of text.
• Include headings to create topical divisions.
• Use images and other graphic design elements to break text blocks.
Design Mistakes 08. Not Scaling Design Elements Correctly
In terms of graphic design, the scale you will use in the text blocks, headings, images, and other web design elements will play an equally important role in determining how your web page design will turn out.
Non-designers with a lack of graphic design knowledge, are at times, reluctant to use the correct scaling.
Creating a balanced design using an appropriate scaling is an ingenious way to approach your web page layout development as it will allow tiers of information to speak for themselves.
Design Mistakes 09. Forgetting about Visual Hierarchy Principles
One of the most important graphic design principles, by all means, is visual hierarchy. It suggests to your website visitors the importance of each element on the page with the rest.
Short or tall, big or small, the size and scaling of graphic design components and typography elements within your designs will determine the overall hierarchy & balance of your composition.
The size, style, and font thickness you will apply to your type will create typographic hierarchy, determining how the information on your website read by your visitors.
The colors you will choose for your website’s headings and the content will also develop the visual hierarchy.
Now that you know about the most common web design mistakes made by non-designers, it is necessary to mention that it is essential to learn the fundamentals of the design, it is even more important to challenge them every once in a while.
Web Craft Station is a professional web design and development company in Leeds, the UK, which helps small and medium-sized businesses with customised eCommerce websites and Search Engine Optimisation.
If you need help with digital marketing, graphic design, or custom website design, get in contact with Web Craft Station, who will happily help and answer any questions you have regarding this topic.