If you get a professional company to design your website ensure that it is useable and readable; however, the exact properties which make this cannot be understood until you actually see a badly designed website. Once you experience a badly designed website then you will know what is required of a good website.
Looking through the net there is an expanse of bad websites to study and analyse, and here are some factors which I believe you are guaranteed to find on them.
When on a website, unless on that specific page for reference, then users will only actually scan your content they won’t read nor digest very much, so having too much content can be a waste of time, makes your site cluttered and will inhibit users from the site.
Flash is one of the biggest turn off for users, waiting for a website to load because of a flash page can be very annoying to users, further to this flash splash pages can be an irritating nuisance when trying to navigate through pages, so it is best to avoid Flash all together. Further to this having 3D style navigation can be very difficult for users to operate, and for the usability it is ideal just to leave all navigation as simple as possible, if the user can’t use this then they won’t be able to get to all your website pages.
The biggest point web content expert Jakob Nielsen makes about designing a web site is simplicity, and more specifically, only having what is really necessary on your site. If a large image is needed, or too much content as stated before, then scrap it. Get rid of all the unnecessary content and instead stock up on the relevant information, even if it may seem boring. If you are selling products online, make sure you give the customer all the information they require, you are persuading them to buy online instead of a shop where they can actually touch the product so you need to be informative, but remember to keep concise.
Whether you want to follow these tips is up to you, but what you must do is research other websites online and keep a note of those which you don’t like and why. Knowing what bad features in a website are will help you in choosing what you want in your own website, because although you may want a pretty website it will be of no use to you if users cannot use it.
Source : http://www.articlesbase.com/web-design-articles
Plantbie's Corner 