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Beginner Web Design Mistakes
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#32Web Design Mistake: maybe don't use a 794,03 KB image on the top of your article?
Web Design Mistake: Display no more than 9 lines of text to your visitors because you managed to fill the rest of the screen with a persistent bar at the top, a persistent SOSOCIAL bar on the side and your clickbait links on the other side: http://i.imgur.com/ruiBvN3.png
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#33Interaction is no substitute for information. -- Me
I agree. The fullscreen background image, 10 words, and call to action button don't make me want to sign up for your product. If I can't find details about your product within a few seconds, I'm gone.
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what the back button is for. I will take you back to where you were before you clicked a link, including scroll down the page to the correct position.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work with infinite scroll pages or other stateful types of sites.
Infinite scrolling is another thing that should be avoided.
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#35Web Design Mistake: maybe don't use a 794,03 KB image on the top of your article?
Web Design Mistake: Display no more than 9 lines of text to your visitors because you managed to fill the rest of the screen with a persistent bar at the top, a persistent SOSOCIAL bar on the side and your clickbait links on the other side: http://i.imgur.com/ruiBvN3.png
Yeah, cause a 480px vertical on a desktop design is completely relevant to modern web development. /s
Protip: you don't have to snark every. single. article. Lay off it already.
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#36Web Design Mistake: maybe don't use a 794,03 KB image on the top of your article?
Web Design Mistake: Display no more than 9 lines of text to your visitors because you managed to fill the rest of the screen with a persistent bar at the top, a persistent SOSOCIAL bar on the side and your clickbait links on the other side: http://i.imgur.com/ruiBvN3.png
Clicky the (x) to remove the "persistant" top bar.
Try the mobile version. After it's loaded (huge image?) it seems reasonable. But that huge image make me wonder what other beasties lurk in the page.
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
They work on clueless and naive people. If that's the audience you're after, cool.
This is simply not true. Sure, you'll get signups from people aren't actually in your target market (clueless and naive), but at the margin you'll also get signups from people are intelligent and high value prospects that wouldn't have otherwise signed up if you weren't aggressive about offering it. To deny the potential value of x by categorically defining all the people who you think would respond to x is ignorance…
You'll lose the people who click the back button the second one of those gets in their face and never return.
Hubris? Sure, if you want to call it that.
Personally, I think that expecting a person to sign up for your site based on no evidence whatsoever is pretty damned hubristic. The message I get is "WE ARE SOOOOO FULL OF TEH AWESUM THAT YOU WILL WANT TO GET SPAMMED BY US DAY AND NIGHT!"
Yeah, good luck with that.
Note that I wouldn't mind nearly as much if the site was clever enough to noticed that I'd looked at 15-20 pages (or whatever) and THEN asked me if I wanted to sign up. But it's never that way. It's always right on the front page, before you can even SEE what's on the site.
There's not a chance in hell that I'll sign up for something like that.
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
They work on clueless and naive people. If that's the audience you're after, cool.
That audience is some huge percentage of the internet userbase, because some huge percentage of people are "clueless and naive." So people who want to just make money off a widely read website would do well to do what works. Just like how in the mobile gaming space irritating pay-to-play/in-app-purchase driven "games" are the money makers, and people who make games in order to make a lot of money should probably make…
Well, everyone has to make their own ethical choices.
Personally, I don't need the karma of annoying the customers, regardless of how much it may seem to work in the short term. I mean, you might as well be Zynga if you're going to do that.
No company survives in the long term by annoying and/or abusing their customers.
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#39A 'sign up for our newsletter' modal pop-up when the user first arrives on a website is not a 'beginner web design mistake' for one simple reason that even websites made by beginners can't ignore: They really work. People sign up in droves. Many people have tested it. It's annoying as hell, but the fact is beginner website designers should learn to make effective websites that work for businesses, not just pretty one…
Our data scientist at Treehouse actually tested this extensively, but it's such a complex issue (lots of qualitative/anecdotal/branding evidence that's difficult to measure) that the results are still inconclusive. Basically, it helped us and hurt us in different ways, but the long term effects seemed bad enough that we stopped.
If after extensive research the worst you can say is that "results are still inconclusive," it is hardly a "beginner web mistake" on par with bad navigation.
I think the reason you included modal forms in your article is the same reason people are posting in this thread about them: you personally don't like them.
I would say that "substituting your opinion for testing" actually is a beginner web design mistake.
Re: Beginner Web Design Mistakes
#40Interaction is no substitute for information. -- Me
Yes, content first web design is good web design, not superfluous decoration.