You know when you're on a website and something just doesn't feel right, it feels a little bit niggly, and you start to feel that no matter how great the product or the service is, that you're just not going to buy from this website because just something doesn't add up. Over-animating everything. Oh my goodness. We've all had that experience, whether that's landing on a client's website and either they've clearly self-built and it's time for a rebuild or whether we've followed one of those meta ads and we go on the website and think, oh yeah, there's no great shakes here. You get about halfway down the page and you think, oh, this isn't the right one for me. Whatever it is, there's a consistency in bad practice amongst the website design community that I'm going to call out here because honestly, we can do so much better than this. People don't like it. Haters are going to hate. I don't make any money from my personal blog, so it's a really nice set. Hi, and welcome to another episode of Websites Made Simple with Holly Christie. That's me. I am a website designer, a website designer mentor, and I am here to help you have a career that you absolutely love, all without losing your mind or dropping the ball. You ready? Let's get started. So today, I particularly wanted to tackle these things I really, really wish we would stop doing on websites. And by we, I mean you, because I stopped doing this a very long time ago and my website's got a heck of a lot better for it. So, number one, and this can be a tricky one because this could be a client directive, but over animating everything. Oh, my goodness. You know, when you're scrolling on a website and the text appears and then the images fly in and then you have this and then you have that and then you scroll down the page and something else happens. and every part of the website is animated. First of all, it's not a good end user experience. And I'm sure that you probably know that. People report that it can make them feel a little bit seasick as well. And it can be a frustrating experience because sometimes people just want to get to the information. In fact, I recently did a webinar with Joe Watson, who is an incredible copywriter. and we really talked about we don't need to see the thesis. We need to know, you know, the highlights of something and how we can buy it. And it's harder to navigate and get to that if things are swooping in and flying out. It just, it does not give a relaxing experience for people. So animate occasionally, animate small areas. Like sometimes if I have kind of a container with testimonials drop in, I might put them together so they're like puzzle pieces. So they drop in and out and to the side and stuff. But it's an animation that happens once and once on a page as well. So if you do have to animate stuff, try and go for once per page. Trust me, the users who are going to be going on that website, they will thank you for it. If you have a lot of animation on your own website, turn it off. This is not something that people think, oh, I love the animation on that. you know, this is what's going to make me buy from that person. It just doesn't happen. And a positive side of it is that you will see your Google page speed scores go up as well, because animation slows things down. If you're a website developer, or you were a website designer, and you're really, really looking to take your career to the next level, I have a program that I am launching It called the Phoenix Program because it all about transformation And if you feel that you got the skill set there and you got the tools to building websites you really really want to you know double triple your income I not going to make a huge claim here, but I do know generally how much website designers earn when they're not working in any form of mentorship or coaching capacity. So if you really want to make a difference to income. If you want to have tons of support, nail your messaging, not end up with the one-star reviews if you can help it, then come and check out my Phoenix program. It could be absolutely the right thing for you. So head over to websitesmadesimple.co.uk. You'll see the Phoenix program there. They get right in the middle there under the logo so you can see it. my second thing i absolutely would love to see the back of is really funky menus and trust me i am someone who loves experimenting i love creating i love playing around with these things in fact when i did my simply sites when i first set them up gosh nearly four years ago now I had really funky menus within them especially I had particularly one that was a shop and it had like the logo kind of in the middle of this header image and it had a menu that kind of expanded and kind of looked a bit like an ice cream cone it was perfection every single person who bought that template and a lot of people bought it were like I can't really get the menu working people don't know how to look at this and they can't get back to there or whatever else and I went on to do some research. And it was that people and Google and the other search engines want a menu that is predictable. This is at the top of the page, which has proper names on them, like home, about, services, contact, that sort of thing, testimonials, rather than things like praise or good thoughts or vibes or, you know, whatever people are putting out there. A traditional header menu will always, always do you really well. On a desktop version of a website, and actually even a tablet version of a website these days with the resolution of tablet screens, when we were first designing for tablets like a million years ago when they first came out, we would make the tablet menu very similar to the mobile menus. And that's because the resolution on tablets were quite low. So it kind of worked better. But now you just get amazing tablets and they should have that expanded desktop menu as well. Something really traditional. I mean, people are always going to have a difference of opinion on whether you have home about services, blah, blah, blah, contact, or whether you have home services, blah, blah, blah, about contact. For me, I'm quite traditional. I like home and about. And we know regardless that people do not navigate websites in a linear fashion. They don't start, particularly in a kind of country where they read from left to right as well. They don't start with home on the left and work their way through clicking everything until they get to contact on the right. You know, they're going to jump around. And actually, if you have a proper link structure, which I'm going to talk about in this episode as well, it particularly means that people won't be navigating in a linear fashion as well. Use your creativity to get creative in other places. I'll leave that menu at the top of the page. Speaking of the top of the page, please, I personally, this is the hill that I will die on. Every website should have a sticky menu. No exceptions. There are so many websites out there like that I land on weekly that you go on the website, the menu looks great. You scroll down the page, the menu's gone. You get about halfway down the page and you think, oh, this isn't the right one for me. And you have to go all the way back up to the top to get the menu. No, you really, really need to make it sticky It is a really small change It a massively quick win It gives a better user experience and people are going to stay on the website for longer because of it because they can easily navigate without having to put in extra work extra scroll time of going up to the top there. I know it sounds like just such a small kind of petty thing to really go on about, but it makes a massive difference in how long people actually stay on your website. So really do make it something that you go on to do. So now we come onto the proper link structure. And I was so delighted to have Nikki Pilkington, who is an SEO specialist, on a webinar with me recently. And if you'd like the links to any of the webinars, do get in touch with me at hello at websites made simple.co.uk. I will be delighted to share them with you. and Nikki is a really big player in the SEO industry and she was talking about one of the most important things that you can do for SEO purposes is to have a proper link structure on your website and remember when we look at links, we're looking at linking text from one page to another, we're looking at buttons, they're also links, we're looking at your navigation menu, your sticky navigation menu that's at the top there, Those are also links. Also think carefully about whether you choose to have columns that link on clicks, whether you choose to have images or videos that take you somewhere else when you click, or whether you choose to have icons that take you somewhere else when you click. I am again, going to be quite old school here. I've been in this industry a really long time. And I am going say for SEO, for accessibility, for search engines, but for your user experience on that website, you really need to make sure that what people click is very, very obvious. I was on a website the other day. Someone had really nicely laid out icons, you know, a column with an icon in it, and then the content. And you had to click the icon to get to the content, but it didn't tell you that you had to click the content. I only knew because I hovered over it. And then of course, my cursor changed to tell me to do that. That's really bad for accessibility. It's really bad for your SEO. It's a really bad user experience as well. And I know it can feel frustrating to have to put a button or a link text or something like that. But if you think how many people go on websites who actually have issues maybe with fine motor control or they have vision issues, something like that. We want to make sure our websites are as inclusive as possible, not just because Google would like that, but because we have a moral responsibility to do so. So do make sure you have a proper link structure all across your website and your users will thank you for it. Google will reward you for it and you will have a really good robust website as well. You're just going to have to check those links regularly to make sure they all work all of the time as well. we are all guilty of this one and I am going to throw my hands up and say I am guilty of this too particularly if I'm on a dev site and I will go back and change it and go for consistency just chucking any old image into the website and you think oh well just try this here and you don't label it and you don't reduce the size of it and you don't compress it and it might not even be a relevant image either. And that's something that I've done myself and then I have to quickly kind of comb through and take out before I send the website live. And I'll often do it if I am testing an image or a concept or a design. But of course, what happens is I'll put something in there to test it. And that's going into the database and the size with the labeling with everything else it has in regardless as to whether I go and use it And I don want my database have a lot of irrelevant images or a lot of really large images What can often happen will be that a client will then say oh yeah, that's great. And they sign off that section. You say, oh, brilliant. I'll move on. That image gets completely forgotten about. All your website will be WebP images. And then you'll have a couple of JPEGs or PNG files that are just hogging all the space there, just providing that kind of inconsistency there as well. So make sure that the images that you use, that they're relevant, that they're the right size, that they're compressed, that they're the same right format and that they have been labelled correctly as well. My final one, and it's a biggie, I'm going to say that, is inconsistent design. so we can as creatives have a tendency to think I want to try everything or this oh I've read this bit in there about section and it would be so cool to do this thing here I've been there luckily I tend to go there with like my personal blog or something like that and I think well you know if if people don't like it haters gonna hate I don't make any money from my personal blog so it doesn't really matter. But when it comes to websites you are building for people to get work from and in the industry and stuff, you're going to want to be really consistent with your design. I mean, obviously, in an ideal world, we all work with a brand kit as well. So we all have direction of what we're doing with the design. The brand kit should be more than just the logo and the hex colors for the brand. The brand kit should have any icons you're going to use or suggestions for icons. It should have backgrounds if there's going to be things like gradient backgrounds and all different things like that. It should have a mood board in there for the style images and the vibe and the feel that you're going for. And of course, it should have the font files as well. So it should be this really robust document that you work off. And if you have clients who come or you might have for your own websites and you think, I've done the branding myself, I don't have a whole brand kit per se, there is nothing stopping you from creating a brand kit for yourself. And if your client doesn't have one, it's really good to kind of get them on a call and just talk them through the concepts of some of this stuff and ask them to put a mood board together as well. Yeah, they can do that on Pinterest, they can add different kind of images and colors and blog posts and stuff like that on there. And it is going to make working on their website so much easier for you. It's going to give all of you a better experience as well, because you're all kind of working to the same vibe. And it's going to provide that consistency that can sometimes wander off when we don't have these kind of really tight, controlled outcomes there as well. So make sure your design is super consistent as well, because it's one of the big things that Google, your search engines are looking for. And they're looking for these based on, They know how people are navigating websites, the websites people are clicking through, spending time on, the websites people are buying from. And they know that consistency is what gets people staying on websites. And so it's one of their criteria for SEO is a really good consistent design. So that's all from me today. Feels like a bit of a Grampy episode, actually. It feels a little bit like, ha, these are all the things I hate people doing on websites. I would love to hear from you about what you hate people doing on websites as well what things really irritate you I would love to know whether you agree with the stuff that we've talked about today which one's the one that you agree with the most for me it's always going to be the menus always always make sure if you take anything away from this podcast go and make those menus sticky and until next time have a great time in your website career Music Music Music
