Tips to Keep Your New Website Manageable and User Friendly

When you design your little home on the Internet, there are a few do's and don'ts to live and breathe by. One of them is don't over-design your web page. Not only does it get on people's nerves, but it feels like you're overcompensating for something. While it's often quite impressive when you incorporate unique 3D elements and flashy effects to your site, it has its trade-offs in performance and convenience on some levels of functionality.

Most people design their pages with low-end devices in mind; it doesn't matter if we're talking PC or smartphone here. The fact is, when you set up your online presence with a highly demanding interface that sucks down bandwidth and uses extraordinary amounts of RAM and processing power, you've already given a significant chunk of your viewers a good reason to never come back. The other thing to consider is that certain simpler design elements like the "hamburger menu" are only intended for specific platforms.

If you've had a look at rapper Travis Scott's website recently, you'll be starstruck with a beautiful specular-infused model of an eagle head that's slowly rotating on an axis but can be interacted with by dragging it with a mouse or moving your smartphone. The fact that it runs so smoothly is already a testament to wonderful optimization, but there's a problem here. Notice the four corners. What are those? They're menus. Whoever designed this page put all the eggs in the aesthetics basket and forgot to incorporate an iota of functional navigation.

In keeping with top-notch user experience, you should ideally strike a balance - always. Now, maybe top-notch isn't your modus operandi; perhaps your ethos is to deliver a less-than-perfect statement about your business model to fit a less-than-stellar product or service. This is fine. After all, there can only be one who's truly the best, and it's probably not you. But at bare minimum, try to stick to the basics of web-side courtesy and don't make your web page a nuisance to view or navigate. Travis Scott's site is a fair example of what you probably shouldn't do.