A central image flashes crazily on the screen…weird elevator music crackles out of your speakers…you squint to read the dark purple text against a black background…sound familiar? Yes – its bad web design. But how important is it? Is it necessary for a site to be user friendly or to meet basic standards of taste? Does a site’s aesthetic matter?
Firstly, we need to explore what ‘good’ design for the web is. Page designers have always attempted to make pages interesting and appealing to web users but many designs have fallen short of the mark and continue to do so. Central issues often lie with a user’s ability to read the page content clearly, get to the information they want quickly and easily, and not have to dodge hundreds of advertisements and extra windows.
The most dangerous thing that bad web design can do is cause visitors to your site to lose interest. Many internet shoppers are notoriously impatient: If your home page is difficult to navigate, hard to read, or slow to load due to video and ads, they won’t wait around to find out what you’re about. In this way, customers can be found, alienated, and lost again forever, all in a matter of seconds.
In this way, it is possible for a business to lose countless numbers of prospective customers without even knowing it, driving them away for the first and last time by failing to implement basic rules of clarity, simplicity, and readability. It is important to highlight the products and services offered without inadvertently pulling the visitor’s attention away.
So how important is good web design? It would seem that to achieve it, one must think less like a designer and more like an internet user; taking advantage of the fact that small business or large, it is the one with bad design that loses custom. Research into online surfing trends suggest that terrible design can hinder more than good design can help, so it is extremely important to focus on designs which are user friendly and attractive. A site user will base judgements on face value and you only get one chance to make the right impression.
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