Note From Steve: This post is written by a guest blogger

Have you ever wondered why some websites just look a lot better than others? When you visit there site it’s a much more enjoyable experience and it’s not something you find happens a lot in the online world. As soon as you start looking through it you are given some great information that can help change your life and it’s always easy to find. They make everything as simple as possible for you. It’s the kind of website that keeps you returning back for more and sharing with all your friends.

Then you have the others. They are called the others because everything about them is different. They seem to make everything much harder than it should be. It’s like they have been designed by a team of monkeys from the zoo getting taught how to build and sell websites. You don’t want your website to fall into this category, but maybe it does at the moment. We can look at what makes these websites so horrible and you can decide for yourself if there is anything you need to change about yours.

Oversized logo

A nice logo makes people feel nice and that is understandable, but it doesn’t mean they should be the size of a pineapple. When you look at some websites the logo nearly covers the entire page. People don’t care what your logo looks like and they definitely don’t want it getting in the way of the information they do want to see. If you want to design a fancy logo then do it, but just make sure it’s small enough to fit in a small corner of the screen.

Terrible navigation

People need a navigation bar because they want to find certain pages on your site. They don’t just come to look at the homepage, but that is what you would think when you don’t see a navigation bar anywhere in sight. They are usually near the top of the page because that is where people go to look for them. If someone lands on your site from Google and you make it difficult for them to search the site they will go straight back to where they came from.

A hidden opt-in box

You make your money by emailing prospects after they have signed up to your list. It’s much easier to sell something to people once you have built up a relationship with them, so obviously the opt-in box is vital. Now go look at most websites and they don’t even have one, but when they do it’s always hidden. That means less subscribers and less money. The other thing you need to make sure is that it’s attractive so more people will want to enter their email address.

Horrible writing

Even if you are the greatest writer that ever lived you still need to make sure you are laying out your articles correctly. That means having a different color for your sub-headings so people will feel like your article is in readable chunks. Images are also important because they give people something pretty to look at and it definitely keeps them from falling asleep. The last thing that people mess up on is having text so small that not even an eagle could read it.

A full sidebar

The sidebar is on a website for one very important reason and that is to offer visitors links to pages or products that can be found on your site. If you want to send people away from your site you might include social media buttons too. What it’s not there for is to fill with as much junk as possible. This looks dreadful and spoils a nice design. Start taking out everything that doesn’t need to be there and be ruthless.

Featured images:

•  License: Creative Commons image source
•  License: Creative Commons image source
•  License: Creative Commons image source