10 Ways to Make a Terrible eCommerce Website

1. Bad Color Schemes

The colors you choose on your website are very important. Remember that colors can have a psychological effect on people, so you should remember your palette. Remember that the color on the computer screen looks different than on the printout. Avoid using very large areas of bright colors such as red, yellow, orange and pale pink because it is difficult for the eyes.

When choosing a palette of colors, think about the basic principles of the color theory. Enter the word “color circle” on Google and change it to basic. Look at other selected sites and see what kind of colors they use. You can get ideas for color palettes from websites such as Koller or Kolorvers.

2. Flash Pages

Flash websites can be very attractive, but if you’re not in the entertainment industry, it cannot be very effective for many reasons. First of all, Flash pages can be loaded slowly, especially if you do not use a fast Internet connection. Internet users have very little attention. If your site does not load in 8 seconds or less, it does not. In addition, Flash sites are disadvantageous to search engine rankings because there is no content to crawl by robots. But the biggest reason for avoiding flash sites is that they are distracting visitors.

Look at the largest e-commerce sites and notice that none of them has a Flash page. Why not Because scattered customers do not buy. If you use your website to promote or sell a business, you need the least amount of gaps between the content and the user. So, stick to the usual vanilla HTML page.

3. Confusing Navigation

Make sure that the site navigation is clear and easy to track. Many novice designers make the mistake of trying to push many links in the navigation. Many options confuse users, and they often leave the site to find where to click. Make navigation easier. Do not leave 5 to 7 categories in the main navigation.

Use additional navigation in the sidebar of drop-down menus and pages that are deeper on the site. Avoid imaginary animated navigation that hovers over the menu to see where they can go. Also, if you’re using a drop-down menu, make sure you click OK. Nothing more frustrating than not being able to click on the drop-down menu.

4. Incompatible Text Formatting

Sometimes, in order to make the website more attractive, some websites designs use different fonts in the Nubebit project. Unfortunately, this approach gives the site an amateurish look. Do not use one or two separate fonts for the entire site, for body copy and header. Also, be consistent with the size of the font. Do not go for less than 11 points for a body copy, especially if your website appeals to older recipients. The ideal size of the body copy ranges from 12 to 14 points. Size and subtitle headers are 2 to 4 points higher than the body copy. So for a 12-point body copy, keep a number between 14 and 16 for headings and 18 to 20 points for main headers.

5. Using Obscure Fonts

You want to avoid fancy fuzzy fonts on your site for two reasons. The first reason is that they can be difficult to read and you want to keep everything for people who see your site. Another reason is that if a person browsing the site does not have a font that you want to download to your computer, he will see it in a different font. This means that you lose control over the appearance of your website.

Now you can set to put a backup font, which means that if you do not have the first font download, it will go to the next one you specify. Now you can do it using special fonts, but this is not recommended, because each font size is not the same as another font. This means that you will never have full control over the appearance of your website.

6. Crowded or Unorganized Projects

The best layouts are simple and clean. Resist the urge to throw everything on your site. If all this does not appear on one page, the user cannot miss anything. Again, giving people many visual options will be confused and go away instead of scrolling from a crowded place. Join a lot of white space in your layout. Between the visual elements of the breathing room allows the eye to focus on individual elements.

7. Unreadable Text

The normal color scheme on the Internet is white text on a black background. Although this plan has the effect of creating things that appear in the “pop” of the page, it is also difficult to read. The most readable color scheme for text is black or dark brown text on a white background.

You should also avoid using very light brown text on white color. Although it was all the anger in web design a few years ago, reading less contrasting text can be difficult. Moving the traditional black color on the white color scheme will make the text readable by everyone.

8. A Busy Pattern in the Background

The occupied backgrounds are very distracting and also hit the first days of the Internet. Any item you keep on a busy background will be lost. Especially if it’s text. Stay entangled in solid colors, soft gradients or backgrounds in micro-patterns. They will give your project the right interest without any power.

9. Bad Customer Service

If customer service is really bad, very few people will benefit from your services. Imagine that you have a problem with your order and want to contact an online customer representative. If you talk to this person and she is really angry or does not communicate with you correctly, will you ever visit this site again?

10. The Transaction is Not Secure

Persons making transactions via a credit card or online banking account should feel secure on the website. If the site is not secure, people lose money, which can be a problem. There should not be any errors that the user can point to. Such errors reduce the market value of the e-commerce website.

Article Source

10 Ways to Make a Terrible eCommerce Website was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.