The quality of your website plays a pivotal role in attracting visitors, which in turn, brings you business. Users keep coming back to your website if it fulfills their various needs. On the other hand, poorly designed websites drive your customers away. Some of the mistakes committed by web designers are highlighted below.

Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Such search engines are particularly difficult for elderly users, but they hurt everybody. A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document’s importance. Much better if your search engine calls out “best bets” at the top of the list, especially for important queries, such as the names of your products. Search is the user’s lifeline when navigation fails. Even though advanced search can sometimes help, simple search usually works best, and search should be presented as a simple box, since that’s what users are looking for.

Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts. Worst of all, PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate. PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.

A good grasp of past navigation helps you understand your current location, since it’s the culmination of your journey. Knowing your past and present locations in turn makes it easier to decide where to go next. Links are a key factor in this navigation process. Users can exclude links that proved fruitless in their earlier visits. Conversely, they might revisit links they found helpful in the past. Most important, knowing which pages they’ve already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again. These benefits only accrue under one important assumption that users can tell the difference between visited and unvisited links because the site shows them in different colors. When visited links don’t change color, users exhibit more navigational disorientation in usability testing and unintentionally revisit the same pages repeatedly.

A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. It is intimidating, boring and painful to read. Write for online, not print. To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:

• Subheads
• Bulleted lists
• Highlighted keywords
• Short paragraphs
• The inverted pyramid
• A simple writing style

CSS style sheets unfortunately give websites the power to disable a Web browser’s “change font size” button and specify a fixed font size. About 95% of the time, this fixed size is tiny, reducing readability significantly for most people over the age of 40. Respect the user’s preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms, not as an absolute number of pixels.

Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience.

Users are highly goal-driven on the Web. They visit sites because there’s something they want to accomplish, may be even buy your product. The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for. Sometimes the answer is simply not there and you lose the sale because users have to assume that your product or service doesn’t meet their needs if you don’t tell them the details.

Tags: Reasons for Lackluster Web Design