web design mistakes

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The web design guru Jakob Nielsen has been working in the field of web site usability for several years. Every year, he publishes a list of the ten worst aspects of current web design. His "Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005" includes a plea to get back to basics in web design - this becomes clear when he describes the top four design problems:

poor legibility caused by small fonts, fixed font sizes and low colour contrast between text and background
poor design of links such as not making links clearly visible and not differentiating between visited and unvisited links
inappropriate use of Flash, such as using it merely to jazz up a boring page
poor copywriting

how to avoid these pitfalls?

Our extensive marketing experience constantly makes us review the web sites we design from the user's perspective. We will help you to fine-tune your copywriting and ensure that the site presents the right information in a clear and simple structure. We review colour schemes and link colours to ensure they are clear and usable. We generally use font sizes defined in keywords so that users can easily re-size fonts in their browsers. Focusing in this way on the usability of each site tends to highlight very quickly any basic errors.

The use of Flash is a bit of a balancing act. Clients often like the impact that Flash animation can bring to their web site. But sites which rely on Flash for navigation can be slow and frustrating to use because Flash can involve larger file sizes and slower downloads. And some users just don't have the Flash viewer installed - and don't want to install it just to view your site! So we encourage clients who are interested in Flash to use it in a restrained way. A subtle and stylish Flash element can really help to reinforce your market positioning. But we don't force your users to install the Flash viewer. And we try to ensure that Flash does not interfere with simple and quick navigation. Users who are returning to your home page may want to quickly navigate to another page in your site without being forced to watch again the Flash animation they have already seen when they first visited your site!

Our web design process and the web design detail we consider on every project can identify and correct basic design problems in several ways:

validating the XHTML or HTML code
validating the CSS
testing accessibility against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
testing our sites in a range of browsers
seeking feedback at several stages from our clients

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