Design mistakes: how to avoid them

If you can avoid 5 common design mistakes, your e-commerce site should experience more sales.

1. Not planning out your web site. Planning is probably the most time consuming function of solid web design. Planning is also the most overlooked step in the design process.

Before you design a graphic or lay out a single html page consider the following:

• What are your goals for the site?
• What type of visitors are you likely to attract?
• What plans do you have for the site navigation?
• Map out your site logically before designing.

2. Slow load times. Super high-end flash animation looks great, but if it takes more that a few seconds to download you are pushing away potential customers.

How big is too big? Typically if you can keep a page under 40K, you are golden, 60K is not to bad. Over 100K? Try to avoid! Test your site, check the time it takes to load from a dial-up account and remember the majority of your visitors are going to be accessing your site via a dial-up service.

3. Outdated Information. Many e-commerce business owners setup a nice site and then forget to update it for months. Not only will the search engines think you have a dead site, so will your customers!

Plan on adding a page of fresh content to your site as often as possible. GoogleBot shows preference to sites that add or update content daily.

4. Broken Links. You would think this goes without saying, but broken links are everywhere and diminish credibility. Check and re-check your site for broken links.

5. The dreaded horizontal scroll. The horizontal scroll is a usability nightmare. If your site will not fit an 800x600 resolution and your visitors get a scroll bar at the bottom of the page, you will loose customers. Be sure that nothing on your page will push the design out past 780 pixels wide (Leave 20 pixels for the vertical scroll).

Change your screen resolution, and take a look at the site in all of the available options that you have. Right now 800x600 is the most popular with 1024x768 the next favorite.

To do this:

1. Right click on your desktop.
2. Click Settings.
3. Move the Screen Resolution Bar to 800 x 600 and click ok.
4. Once your screen refreshed check for horizontal scrolling.