The design of your website is extremely important. Whether it’s a website for personal use or a business asset, you need to ensure it’s easy and fun to use. What you don’t want to do is annoy your users. Of course, if you do want to make users cringe, then go ahead and make these popular design mistakes,
Hamburgers
A lot of people have seen a hamburger button, but don’t actually know that it’s referred to as a hamburger menu. Yet many of us know, instinctively, what it does. You know those three horizontal lines running in parallel that you see in the top corner of websites when you’re on your mobile phone? They’re what we generally use to access the options of the website. It’s how we easily navigate a website on our mobile phone.
That’s great and all, but what about desktop versions of websites? A lot of website designers are trying to be creative by adding a hamburger button to the desktop website. But this is an awful mistake. When people visit websites, they want to navigate it using clearly-labelled links that appear on the top of the page. By default, a hamburger button hides all of its content. People aren’t looking for this sort of button on the desktop version of a website. You should only ever use this button – or any other ‘drop down menu’ button – on a mobile version of a website!
Slideshows
Slideshows are becoming an extremely annoying and popular trend. A few years back, it may have seemed like a great idea. Perhaps it was because they were used only scarcely, usually for browsing a gallery of images. But nowadays, they seemed to have crept into the modern web design aesthetic.
This is a shame, because they shouldn’t be used at all. A slideshow on your website just slows everything down. Of course, if your website is running slow, then you shouldn’t just assume that its only the fault of the slideshow itself. As with any slow functionality on your website, it might be the result of not using the best website hosting. But, in general, slideshows end up in way more bandwidth consumption than can be justified. It’s simply not worth it.
Pop-ups
Ever since the World Wide Web opened its doors to the public in the nineties, people have been lamenting the existence of pop-ups. I want you to keep that sentence firmly locked in your memory. Since the nineties. For over two decades, people have hated pop-ups. It’s a common hatred, and everyone knows it. So why do web designers insist on using them?
When you enter a website, you’re usually just hoping to have a look around. If you do want to proceed further into any offered services or functionality, then you’ll find the means to do so. But there are so many websites that immediately interrupt this flow but asking if you’d like to sign up to an e-mail list. Or if you’d like to start a live chat with customer service. These things are more likely to have the user close the page than become further engaged in it. So don’t do it.