Common Website Problems

Examples of Bad Web Designs

If your website design is more than three years old, it may be a good candidate for a website design evaluation and upgrade. You may be loosing customers because your web design looks amateurish and unprofessional. Here are some examples of bad web designs:

Entry Page

Does your small business web design use an "Entry Page" containing little more than a picture and an "Enter Here" button? This is the #1 killer of visitors to your website. Ask yourself: If you had a store front with nothing displayed in the window, and put up a gate with a "Press to Enter" button, would you get many visitors? Of course not! Bad Idea!


Unreadable Text

Does the graphic design of your website use "artsy" combinations of text and background color that make the text hard to read, such as light-grey text on a white background?

Why on Earth would you want your text to be hard to read?

Poor Formatting and Navigation

Does your text stretch all the way across the page, or include underlined words that are not links? Is your site navigation incomporehensible, inconsistent, and difficult to use?


Bad Layout and Broken Links

Does your website have a cluttered and confusing layout? This will cost you sales. Does your site have broken links that lead to error pages? (People and search engines view these as an indication of a low quality, un-maintained website.)


Unnecessary Flash Animations

Does your web design use distracting and unnecessary animations that blink, dance, prance, fade and are otherwise distracting? You may think they're cute, but visitors find them annoying and unprofessional.


If you answered any of these questions with a "Yes", then your web design should be revised.

Examples of Good Web Designs

The #1 thing you want to do with your website is make it easy to use and ensure that the visitor has a good experience. Here are some characteristics of a good website:

Simple, Easy-to-Use Navigation

Your web design should have a menu or navigation bar that makes it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for. Standardize it on every page. Do not use an image map for navigation.


Fast Page Download Times

Google is the most popular search engine, in part, because it has a simple, uncluttered, and quick-loading search page. If your web design is cluttered with oversized pictures, animation, or (please don't do this) self-loading audio, visitors will click away from your page out of impatience.


Site Consistency

Every page on your site should reflect a consistent web design theme. If some pages have different backgrounds, graphics and text sizes, it will look disorderly to the visitor. If your website has a poor graphic design or disorderly appearance, they will go somewhere else.


Optimized for Search Engines

This is the single most important thing you can do to improve your website design. See our Search Engine Optimization page.