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The popularity of blogging and sites like Myspace have tempted, shall we say, “non-professional” designers to throw up pages without much thought.[1]

The number one reason people will immediately navigate away from your site is a bad design. If the reader can not see the text, find your navigation buttons, or are assaulted by your color choices they will never come back.

Here are six of the biggest design mistakes:

1. Atrocious color schemes. One only needs to spend about five seconds browsing Myspace to see examples of the worst possible color combinations and hard to read text. Here’s a tip, grey text on a black background is very hard to read. Actually, black backgrounds are almost always a bad idea, you will be tempted to compensate by using too-bright colors for the rest of your elements. Nothing’s worse than trying to read a page with bright yellow lettering on a black background. I highly recommend using this online color schemer when working on your design.
2. Large blocks of text. Not only are gigantic blocks of text boring, but they are hard to read. Learn to break up your text into paragraphs, use lists, and by all means add images and graphics to your posts.
3. Slow loading pages. High speed internet access has changed the way most American’s use the web, though the rest of the world still uses dial-up access. The average amount of time a user will wait for a site to load before getting disgusted and moving on is less than 20 seconds. There are many ways to improve your page load time that I will explore in later posts, but here are a few quick tips:
   • Resize your images to fit the page. Unless you are selling digital prints, there is no reason to use a 1028X764 pixel 300dpi image on your page. Even the most advanced monitors only show 100dpi.
   • Use CSS. Separating your content from your design vastly improves page load time. Style sheets only need to be loaded once across all your pages.
   • Remove unnecessary javascripts. Each one runs every time the page is loaded, and often holds up the page while they execute. Often, scripts like stat counters and weather bugs make hits to external servers that have to process the information before your site can continue loading. Now your page load time is dependent on the speed of some other server.
   • Overuse of embedded audio/video. If your blog is all about music, audio and video makes a lot of sense, and you can speed up the load time by limiting the number of posts that appear on your front page. If your blog doesn’t focus on music or other media, use video and audio sparingly.
4. Too many ‘widgets’ or unnecessary tools. When readers want to know the weather in Miami, they are going to visit weather.com, not your blog. On the rare occasions that someone may need to know what phase the moon is in, they can easily look outside or on an astronomy site. Most users have a calendar program on their computer so unless your blog is date driven, you don’t need one on your site. When you find a new ‘cool’ widget to put on your blog, ask yourself this important question: “Am I putting this here to improve my reader’s experience or to compensate for the lack of a good design?”
5. Lack of navigation. If a user can’t figure out how to get to your about page, find other posts, or move around, they won’t come back. Don’t hide your buttons or bury them in the footer.
6. Ads Ads Ads Ads Ads. A sprinkling of ads on your site is fine, and can even be an attribute if you use content-targeted advertising. However, no one wants to have to dig through flashing banners and obnoxious pop ups to find your content. Are you really making any money from those all those ads? Not likely. Ditch them and stick to something simple.
   [2]

What are some design mistakes you’ve seen in your web travels? Do you see any mistakes I’ve made on this site?

[1] Yes, the vomit reference is intentional.

[2] Yes, that is my referral link. No issues of non-disclosure here.