Nov 06 2008
10 common design mistakes
Design mistakes. Everyone makes them. Here are 10 (in no particular order) common design mistakes. (I’ll tell you how to fix and/or avoid them later!)
- Not enough contrast between the text and the background. Anyone who has been to a site and come away with eye strain will tell you how absolutely annoying this is.
- Unintentional horizontal scrolling. Don’t make me have to scroll left or right to read your content because you haven’t sized an image correctly, or your template doesn’t allow for multiple screen resolutions and/or browser sizes. (Shameless plug alert: Intentional horizontal scrolling is okay. Check out Web-Betty.)
- Times New Roman Font. For everything. Not only is it a poor choice for readability online, it screams amateur.
- Images that are not properly anti-aliased. Until PNG is fully supported (or IE 6 users come to their senses and upgrade), make sure your ‘transparent’ images really are.
- Images that are stretched or distorted. If you need to resize an image using the height and width attributes, make sure you have the dimensions correct. Even better, if you are making the image smaller for design reasons and the larger version is not necessary, take 5 minutes, use a photo-editing software, and just resize the damn thing.
- Pixelated images. If you are working with rasterized images, don’t take an itty-bitty one and enlarge it. Start big, go small. Not the other way around.
- Using icons for your navigation that only you understand. Don’t make me guess what your icons mean. If I don’t know where I’m going, I know where I’m going. Straight to someone else’s site.
- Spalling and grammer errors. I know, this isn’t really design related, but it’s still important so I’m putting it on the list. Spell check and proofread your content. Period. (Let’s see how many people don’t read the extra info and comment on my ‘mistakes’!)
- A site that takes too long to load. In this day and age, there is no reason why your site should load slower than my toddler eats broccoli. Even if you are showing off your Twilight multimedia portfolio.
- This: pink-glamour[dot]com. Don’t EVER do this. (You’re going to have to type it in—I’m not giving this blog any link love.)
Be sure to subscribe to the RSS. You don’t want to miss how to fix these, if you’ve already fallen victim to them.
Argh, tell me about Today.com and load issues. I’m breaking my own rule, but I can pass the buck on this one.
Today.com is my first foray into trying to get paid–I’m a definite newbie in this area.
Unfortunately, I have to rely on their speed, and their theme choices (which are limited). This blog does break a few other design rules that I haven’t mentioned yet!
Thank you for your wonderful feedback A u d e e! I do agree that Comic Sans should also be avoided like the plague!
As Ben has pointed out, sometimes this blog takes a little longer to load, however, I can’t help that. I don’t have control over many of the aspects here, unfortunately.
To answer your feed question, right now you can find it on the far right sidebar, in the “Meta” section. Thank you for pointing out this oversight. I will be correcting it shortly.
Wonderful comments Rebecca, and right on the mark. Since I’m off for the holiday, the RSS button is the 2nd thing on my to-do list, right after a new post.