What do people think about your website?

Ever wondered if there’s anything about your web design that users may find annoying? In the words of the great Steve Jobs – knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do! When it comes to website design in particular, you need to know what it is about your website that users tend to find annoying and actually do something about unless of course if you don’t want to have them visit you again or stick around long enough to actually buy anything.

Let’s cite an example to better understand the matter – some time ago I was asked by a friend to check a website that he made. He is a website developer in profession and had a client that wanted him to feature a good flashy header. The header itself was wonderful and impossible to miss along with attractive graphics and sound.  I began navigating through the website and it was then that the header started to become an annoyance as it restarted each time you click on something.

Needless to say, it is elements like these and perhaps a lack of good hindsight that makes a website very unpleasant to use making it difficult for users to focus on anything and appreciate what your website offers. Now he was certainly not alone when it comes to inadvertently designing websites that turn out annoying, many website developers are infatuated with their own design ideas and tend to overdo things at some point.

Flashy headers can be a good thing but not when it becomes a major source of distraction and annoyance for your website visitors. A web design ought to effectively communicate the message that your website wants to send to their prospects and that’s simply not possible if your website turns out to be unpleasant and annoying to use.

What makes a web design annoying?

Unfortunately it can be surprisingly easy for a website design to end up as major annoyance for visitors. The funny thing though is that some web developers do seem to have a knack for doing it.  Let’s check out a few more examples:

• Using really big font sizes – Don’t do it unless you really have a good reason to such as catering specifically to people that are visually impaired. People online typically interpret large fonts as shouting and people don’t like getting shouted, do you?
• Background music – Are you in the business of selling a particular type of music? No? Well then don’t annoy your website visitors by practically forcing them to listen to a looping mp3 or midi music in the background as they navigate your webpage
• Pop ups – If you are purposely trying to annoy your website visitors then you surely won’t fail with pop-up windows especially multiple irrelevant ones!

Now these are but a few possible things that could possibly make your website annoying to users.  You can probably think of a lot more that some web developers seem to be oblivious to. The last thing that website developers need is to pour in a lot of time and effort designing websites only to find out later that users are greatly annoyed by it.

So what do you think?  Are you sure your web design isn’t annoying your visitors in any significant way?