Designing and producing a website is a creative endeavor, and it takes a lot of skill to produce a website that is appealing, easy to use and informative, however as you scan through the Internet there are quite clearly some people out there that have absolutely none of the necessary designing or color matching skills necessary to create a website that does not offend to the eyes and cause severe headaches – here are few examples of bad website designs .

Blinding color schemes, annoying flashing lights, data overload and dizzying geometric patterns that can only have been masterminded by a crazy person litter the websites of the daft and inept, and if the graphics alone weren’t bad enough some of them also have scary robotic voice overs that actually send creepy shivers down your spine.

In this day and age where web hosting services offer a vast number of attractive pre-designed templates to suit any kind of personal or business need, there is simply no excuse for websites that are so poorly designed that even experienced website users cannot work out how to navigate around them, or designs so awful and disturbing that you just want to click away from the site as soon as possible so that you stop feeling nauseous.

Just get your sunglasses out and have a look at this one http://www.paperrad.org/ to see what I mean, personally I can’t stay long enough here to work out what this website is actually for, but the flashing psychedelic dog heads are certainly very memorable (especially as they have been burnt onto your retinas).

If you can bear to stay long enough on a bad website, and if you can find anything that resembles a ‘Contact Us’ section send an SOS to the administrative team alerting them to the fact their website seriously sucks, and point them in the direction of a web design manual. You would be doing them a favour in the long run.:)

Fundamentally a website is designed to carry information, whether this be about product, services or subject of interest, and so it should be functional, easy to read and appealing. Design and layout should then focus on getting the information across quickly and efficiently, as any website that looks overcrowded and hectic will put viewers off.

Flashing and scrolling text, animation and auto loading sounds all seem like a good idea at the time, but they can be very irritating to experienced website users, who just want to know what your website is about, and whether it has anything of interest to them. Keep it simple and leave out the gimmicky animations and sounds – industry testing has shown that visitors are more likely to click straight out of websites using these methods immediately, without bothering to read any of the content.

Pop Ups – pop ups carry a significant security risk, and for that reason most people have them blocked or turned off in their browsers. Avoid using them, as you will just annoy any visitors and distract them from what they came to your website for in the first place.

Advertising – this is a good way to make some cash from your website, but try and keep it to a reasonable level, and balance it with the content. Websites should be looking at a ratio of around 80% content, 20% advertising, and this should allow you to create and interesting, and profitable website. For example East of the Web (www.eastoftheweb.com) has some subtle, effective advertising, and by keeping it restricted to the top section of the website it is visible, without being intrusive:

Image Backgrounds – the point is to keep your website simple and easy to read, and image backgrounds are no good for this, creating a confusing, amateurish look, which overwhelms the text and may also cause slow loading times. If you are going to have a background, use a plain colour, leaving any design logos or images in the to the headers and borders. Successful professional websites do this so why not you!

Journalism.co.uk example:

In short – professional web design improves any website and brings better ROI