5 website development mistakes

There are basic lessons that can be learned from designing brochure, shopping or marketing websites that can be applied to websites designed for manufacturing business operational use.  Here are 5 quick tips.

1. Usability is a must

Usability is a main goal for any manufacturing website whether being used by planners, operational teams or project workers.  Think about how users will interact, find information, update content, navigate through pages and learn how to use the site intuitively.  If a user struggles in these areas they will spend less time on the site and may not be willing to return!

2. Avoid bad font

We’ve seen personnel, order tracking websites and stock tracking websites with unusual font styles, overly small and large font sizes and inconsistent use of font making the sites intuitively difficult to use and hard to read.  So instead use standard font sizes (like this) and common font styles like Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Georgia, or Times New Roman, all of which are used regularly and are easy on the eye.

3. Don’t add text on a colourful background

It makes the text difficult if not impossible to read and isn’t helpful to the user.  It puts them off reading and returning to the content, especially if the background is a distracting colour.

4. Make links obvious

If link colours are inconsistent or do not use standard web formats they will not be found or clicked on very often.  It also makes the website non-standard thus making it less intuitive to use.

5. Keep navigation simple

Restrict the use of menus, sub menus, sub levels and groups/sub groups that tend to hide information rather than making it easy to find.  We’ve seen this everywhere from report trees in sales to planning product groupings.  Please avoid it!  Also if you’re making good use of links, make them relevant and ensure they aren’t broken.