Website Problems

The website has many problems, including:

• No focus – the viewer doesn’t know where to look or what to click.

• Multiple colourful backgrounds and font colours are confusing – what is a link?

• No defined corporate identity – where is the logo and the brand-appropriate design?

• Hard to read text in the navigation bar (grey on red).

• Vertical navigation makes the visitor scroll down, and the links are not clearly named.

• Far too much clutter and content that is not optimised for web reading. No

white space to guide the eye or create a sense of order.

• Unrelated content – why is there a picture of a welder?

• The page is not centred – it appears on the left of the screen.

• In addition, the site plays music automatically. This is undesirable for several

reasons: it dramatically slows the loading time of the page, it annoys the

viewer and it can infringe copyright, as it seems to do in this case.

Good design:

• Excellent design layout means that the entire page appears above the fold (you don’t need to scroll down at all).

• Good use of white space and symmetrical layout. Content is minimal.

• Having two navigation bars is confusing, but the links are clearly labelled.

• Text is well laid out for readability and is short, and the headings are clearly defined.

• The three blocks at the bottom suggest calls to action.

Web style guides

The process of designing a website involves choosing specific colours, fonts,

images, layouts and other elements. Once your page is conceptualised, it is a

good idea to create a web style guide. Your web style guide is a document that

defines all your design choices, so that your approach is standardised and easy to

refer to if changes need to be made. It also defines key framework and technical

aspects that are important to remember when making additions or changes. This

document is very useful for maintaining a coherent and attractive website and

helps a new designer get up to speed with your design choices. You should update

it regularly to make sure it conforms to your current designs.

For a small business, it is sufficient to note the basic style elements, colours,

fonts and layout preferences, as well as the approaches to usability and user friendliness

(for example, never having more than five headings in the navigation bar).