The following symptoms are prime indicators of a pre-historic web site:

1. Irritating and Uncoordinated Color Schemes

This is usually one of the most common illnesses among outdated sites.  As the web progressed, interfaces became more standardized and “natural”.  The web somehow managed mesh together a set of color combinations that seemed to work.  It seems that a few designers still haven’t recognized the standards.

In nature the existence of light and shadows prevent every object from having a solid undiluted color. As a result, the human eye is at always slightly irritated by the sight of a solid color.

Examples of Solid Undiluted Colors

The eye-irritating effect of the solid color instinctively draws your eyes to the vicinity, making use of irritating colors appropriate only for the purpose of conversion elements such as arrows, buttons, and other call-to-action objects that need to stand out well beyond the other elements of the interface.

Examples of Natural Diluted Colors (which represent the web 2.0 era)

Keeping your color scheme “natural” and soft on the eyes (using light gradients, and soft/diluted colors like the ones shown in the palette above) improves the visitor’s ability to focus on what’s important- your content and ultimately the call-to-action message that invokes a purchase.

Bottom line, If your visitors start going blind when they visit your site at 2 am, it’s going to be pretty tough convincing them to make a purchase, so invest some time into selecting an appropriate color scheme.

2. Distracting Background Colors & Patterns

Not really sure how this was ever really a good design concept, but seeing sites with strong background patterns in content areas somehow reminds me of the old wallpaper in my grandmother’s kitchen.   Strong patterns cause distraction, and could discourage visitors from continuing onto other pages of your site.  You’d think this was another extremely obvious design principal, but still some have managed to completely ignore it. An extreme example of this negligence is the web page of Yale’s School of Art (pictured above) and featured as a contender in the Worst Websites of 2010.

3. Choppy Gif Animations

I can’t believe I even have to mention this, and fortunately most of the world actually knows (at this point) that you shouldn’t add choppy, repeating 3 frame animations to your web pages. Somehow there’s still a few of you left, and I’m hoping this will change that. If you’re going to use animation on a page, keep in mind web sites in this century are capable of deploying smooth high resolution graphics & animation as well as high definition audio and video.  Choppy animations are now eyesores, and could damage your conversion rate.

4. Bloated Site Navigation

One of the more common symptoms still found amongst dinosaur-age web sites is the bloated navigation menu.  Try keeping your primary navigation bar at a range of between 5 and 8 main navigation links. If you must have more, try exploring the usage of sub-menus/pages. By now most browsers support JavaScript out of the box, and it has become much easier to implement well structured, multi-level navigation menus that are both easy to use, and pleasing to the eye.

5. Low Quality & Over-Compressed Images

We’ve entered an age where even our cell phones are capable of downloading clear high-resolution images pretty quickly. Furthermore,  industry demographics have concluded that most web surfers have adopted broadband internet connections. Take advantage of high quality images to properly convey your company’s message.  Going cheap on your graphics could cost you tons of prospective customers.

6. Flash Intro Pages

While not necessarily a 90′s thing, dedicated Flash intro pages are dead. Like my friend Jay once said “It’s like a glass of water to the face”.  When visitors are on the hunt for information, running into a cheesy flash animation full of jargon with goofy background music could do much more damage than good. Flash has a bad reputation lately by some of the bigger tech companies like Apple, but it’s still a very useful tool when used sparingly, in a contained manner such as a homepage splash image or a banner advertisement.

Okay so my site has some outdated features, so what!?  It still works!

The one common issue that seemed to be the real downfall of 90′s web layouts was their complete lack of focus on conversion or engagement from the visitor.  With the exception of ecommerce sites, you would hardly see web pages actually asking for something from their visitors- every page was full of text and images like a book, with either an email address or phone number at the top.  During a time when most sites had interface issues it was much less of a problem to attract customers, but in the web 2.0 age, it’s important that your web site and landing pages exist for the purpose of conversion.

I’d like to thank Dan Martell for sharing his great collection of old 90′s web sites that managed to remain  standing from the dinosaur days. Also check out webpagesthatsuck.com for a library of old & bad web designs.

Have a question about conversion optimization or internet marketing in general? The marketing professionals at Excedra are standing by right now to help you.  Get a Free Marketing Evaluation Report in seconds at www.excedra.com.

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