With more and more people taking on the internet as a daily part of life, more and more people are venturing into creating websites so that they can profit from the number of visitors using cyberspace. It could be for business-almost always is- for personal gain, or for sharing of important information. Whatever the reason, generating of traffic is always desired. But not everyone is good at that and the point that most people fail in is in the designing of their sites.

There are several rules that are supposed to be followed for a site to be successful. The first rule always has to be with the presentation. When something is visually appealing, the mind will get involved and interest will be created. Content has to be simple and well understood, without any spelling or grammatical errors whatsoever. There are many other rules to follow, with no complexities whatsoever. But not everyone is keen on following them, and thus not everyone is successful in launching a website. You need to be happy with the traffic you generate at the end of the day and not sorry that you ever thought of establishing one.

If you want to launch a website, there are a couple of things that you are supposed to refrain from. Hopefully in so doing, you will encourage the masses to flock your site. The first thing is inclusion of automatic pop-ups a couple of seconds later when a new visitor enters your site. It’s easy to understand your eagerness in getting the visitors details so that they can subscribe to a newsletter or a free e-book that you are offering. But when a visitor is trying to understand what your site has to offer, and then they are distracted by a pop-up, their attention is diverted and the reflex action is closing the popup and probably the webpage as well. If someone wants to subscribe to whatever you have to offer, they will go to the trouble of finding it. What you need to do is ensure that your content is rich and entertaining so that it can encourage someone to go subscribing for a regular dose of related stuff.

Side to side scrolling is a no-no. You might have this great idea for your website, but when the pages are too big for them to fit the computer screen without needing a side to side scroll, you need to reconsider the web design. An internet user wants the convenience of finding information well displayed on a screen, with the only allowed scrolling being downwards and not sideways. If you can stick to that, you have the chance of succeeding with your website. Still on the subject of navigation, it’s extremely important that you provide guided access to the other pages of your website. A visitor does not know your website as good as you do. That gives you the responsibility of guiding them through the pages so that they can find exactly what they are looking for. A sitemap helps, but on its own it does not suffice. A menu should be easily located somewhere in the site. For one that is really huge, hundreds or thousands of pages, it would be well to include a search tool for navigation guidance.

Automatic music playlists are highly discouraged. We all have a place in our hearts for music, but only when we need it. A visit to your site should not trigger the playing of a certain song. For someone in the comfort of their office, chances are they already have some music playing in the background. Getting some from your site would be considered a nuisance and the expected reaction would be to either pause the music, or navigate from the site altogether. The latter, according to observations made is the most common reaction. It’s a traffic killer to say the least. The only exception is only if the site is solely dedicated to music, but even then, the choice of listening should be left with the visitor and not the site designer.

Using the right fonts is extremely important. As much as you want to flaunt some flashy text in an italicized fashion, there is no gain when the text is not readable. Keeping it simple and legible has been a winning combination on many occasions. Presentation is crucial when it comes to marketing a site and anything that does not create visual appeal is disregarded. The background should create ease in reading the text, and not complicating it further. Don’t go for bright colors on a bright background as that’s just wrong.

A complex homepage should be avoided at all costs. The function of a homepage is to introduce the user to the site, and give a description of what he or she is likely to get from the site. It’s a bad idea having too long a page as many users don’t actually read the content but rather just scan through it. When a page is extremely long with a lot of text, a user gets discouraged and moves on. Keep it short and to the point and you will have users flocking your site with every passing day. Don’t use too many flash animations and videos that may slow navigation down. When it takes more than a couple of seconds to load a page, a user looses interest and navigates away to find a site that will offer speed.

Those are among the top bad website design ideas that you need to stay clear off when you are really looking to generate traffic. The fault never lies with the website designer but with you as the site owner since you have the sight vision in your imagination and the designer’s purpose is to bring it to life. Ensure that you have used vibrant colors, that are alluring, attractive, and that the texts are easy to read and arranged neatly in readable paragraphs- needless to add the content should be interesting. Couple that with an elaborate navigation system and site layout and you might well be on your way to receiving thousands of hits per day.