How to Design a Bad Website and What it Means

In the wild west of digital marketing, there are a lot of crappy websites. They don’t follow the guidelines, they’re poorly built, and sometimes even the copy is bad. These websites often don’t get the results that their owners want because they don’t offer a good user experience. It’s important to understand what makes up a good website so you can avoid designing one of these websites yourself. Here’s a short guide to help you out.

What is a Good Website

A good website is one that is informative, engaging, and easy to use. It should be well designed and follow all the web standards. It should be fast and mobile-friendly. The content should be relevant and helpful to the user. Most importantly, the website needs to work on all the major web browsers including Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Safari. You can’t rely on one browser to make sure that your website works with all the others. You need to test it on multiple devices and browsers to ensure that everything looks good and that the user has an exceptional experience on your site. These factors combined make up a good website.

Why is a Good Website Important

Having a good website is important for a business for several reasons. First of all, having a good website shows that you took the time to create a functional and beautiful site. It shows that you are dedicated to providing your customers with the best possible experience on your site. A good website also makes it much easier for people to find your products or services since they can easily navigate your site to learn about you and your business. A good website allows you to connect with your customers and establish a deeper relationship with them. In general, a good website provides value and builds trust between you and your customers. You can’t beat that!

What Makes a Bad Website

A bad website is one that isn’t constructed according to the guidelines mentioned above. These websites often get a bad reputation because of their bad design or lack of content. If you want to create a bad website, there are certain tricks and tips to follow so that it looks worse than it really is. Here are some of the things that you can do:

Don’t Build a Website Around One Focus Point

If your main focus is getting traffic to your site, you might end up with a messy, cluttered layout that’s hard to navigate. You could end up investing a lot of time in creating the perfect landing page only to find out that no one wanted to learn about your service or purchase your product after all.

Make Sure That Everything Is Easy to Find

People have different levels of web browsing experience. Some prefer to read lengthy articles while others want to quickly click on a few links to see what’s new. To create a bad website, you need to make sure that everything is easily accessible and that the links and buttons are obvious and functional. If you want to create a distraction-free reading experience for your visitors, you can use a tool like Google Reader’s Save for Later button to save articles that you’re interested in reading later. This way, you can come back at any time and find the information you need easily without having to search for it.

Don’t Include Too Much Text

As we’ve established above, not all visitors to your site will want to read an entire article before making a purchase decision. Some prefer to quickly skim through the text while others want to dive into the meat of the matter. If you want to create a bad website, you need to make sure that the text is easy to understand and not so lengthy that it takes a while to read. The best way to test how long or short your text should be is to write a few paragraphs and then have someone else read it. You can ask them to simply read the text and give you their opinion on whether it’s easy to understand or not. Once you have their opinion, you can decide if you need to make any changes to the text.

Use Fonts and Colors Accurately

To create a bad website, you need to use fonts and colors that are inconspicuous yet still stand out. If you aren’t sure how to use fonts, choose one of the pre-made font families that come with your theme, and then choose a small, easy-to-read font for your body text. Don’t use any special fonts in your headings or sub-headings because they might end up being the focus of the article when you use an image instead of text.

Use Short But Sweet Headings

To create a bad website, you need to use short headings. If you want to choose a slogan as your heading, make sure that it’s no longer than six words. If you want to create a visual hierarchy, position your slogan at the top of the page followed by a shorter header and then a longer description. As a general rule of thumb, less is more when it comes to headings; use the least amount of words possible to make the point.

Get Rid of Unnecessary Links

Many businesses use their website as an extension of their marketing department. They might create a page about their new product or service, and then, in an effort to promote the product, they’ll add more and more links to that page. While this might work for affiliate marketing since you’re essentially driving traffic to someone else’s site to make a sale, it’s not the best practice for a traditional business website. Links should be for other websites; not your own. Once you have a link to another site, that site’s owner decides whether or not they want to associate their website with you, your products, or your services. It’s their choice. The more you try to force these decisions, the worse your website will end up being. Instead, create a small, easily accessible resource center that includes all the information the viewer needs without having to leave the site.

Keep it Minimal

The last thing that you need on your website is a lot of fluff. People want to quickly get to the point when browsing your site. Keep your design as minimal as possible, but still visually appealing. You should use a tool like Google Page Optimizer to find the right amount of content for your specific niche. The fewer the words, the fewer the chances of someone skipping over it.

Don’t Forget the Mobile Friendly

To create a bad website, you need to make sure that it’s mobile-friendly. Since a lot of people still use mobile devices to look at websites, you should design your site with mobile users in mind. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re limiting your audience and hurting your business. To test whether or not your site is mobile-friendly, use a tool like Google Mobile-Friendly Test; it’s free and easy to use. If you want to quickly and effectively make your website mobile-friendly, use a service like WordPress’s built-in WML or a plugin like All-in-One SEO.

Make Sure That The Design is Mobile-Friendly

As we’ve established above, not all websites will look the same on a mobile device. Some will look good and some will look horrible. You can’t rely on a desktop browser’s viewport settings to make your site look good on a mobile device. You need to look at the overall design of the site and make sure that it’s mobile-friendly. If you want to make sure that your design looks good on a mobile device, use a tool like Avocode’s Responsive Design Checker to test your site across numerous devices.

With these six simple tips, you can ensure that your website is well-designed and easy to use. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you are in or what genre you fall under; a well-designed, informative website can improve your bottom line.