How Not to Make an Ugly Website

• There’s no single standard for beauty, and that’s good because it makes the world a more diverse and interesting place. Unfortunately, the same doesn’t hold true for the world of websites, because there is a standard and people just can’t put their finger on what it is.

Keep Up With Your Brain• People often say the human brain makes a conscious

decision on whether something is appealing or not in the first three seconds of coming into contact with that thing. That sounds about right – if you place a decimal point in front of the number three.

• Humans are incredibly perceptive of their own wants and needs; most of the brain activity that goes into everyday decision-making goes unnoticed. Making it all the more difficult to identify to predict what style or type of website design businesses should incorporate.

• Instead of trying to pin down what works, which is tantamount to playing darts blindfolded, why not avoid all the things that proven to drive visitors away. The internet is full of examples of digital eyesores, and knowing what to avoid, will give a website an edge to becoming a visitor hub.

Keep Up With Your Brain

Get That GIF Off• The Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) is a bitmap image format

introduced in 1987. People have used GIFs in the past for logo design, storage for low sprite data, and low-resolution clip animation. These days GIFs are used as bite-sized clips of humorous events.

• GIFs are a good tool for gathering interest and keeping people amused, but it doesn’t work on business websites. They’re much too informal, and frankly, having to look at more than three unrelated GIFs in a page is taxing on the eye.

• Not to mention that if websites started stuffing their pages with GIFs, it would put enormous strain on the bandwidth. Visitors would navigate away from the site while the home page hasn’t even finished loading.

• Theres a tendency for new companies of stuffing as much content into their websites as they can, and this is a misguided interpretation of ‘everything at your fingertips’. People don’t want everything, they just want what they came looking for, if they can’t find that immediately, they’re gone.

• Scan the website, and decide what visitors will want to see the most. Put those things up, front and centre, and the site will overflow with traffic.

Get That GIF Off

RESOURCES:• http://effortlesssites.com/portfolio• http://birdsontheblog.co.uk/looks-arent-everything-

but-performance-might-be/• http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html