What Makes A Poor Design?

Have you ever been on a site where you feel reluctant to close the tab straight away? What about websites that urge you to head for the x mark within seconds of landing on them?

When people talk about web design, it's almost always about best practice: grids, hierarchy, whitespace, the stuff that wins awards. Nobody spends much time on bad design, but knowing what pushes a visitor to hit close is just as useful. Here's what a poor design usually looks like, and what the fix is in each case.

Inconsistency

A site that was clearly built page by page, without anyone stepping back to check it against itself. One page uses a different button style to the next. Headings jump between two or three different fonts. Spacing that's tight in one section and loose in another for no obvious reason. None of it looks intentional, and visitors notice even if they can't say why. Good design repeats itself on purpose: the same button shape and colour everywhere, the same heading treatment on every page, the same spacing rhythm from top to bottom. Consistency is what makes a site feel like one product, not a folder of separate documents.

Findability

The key information is hard to find. A visitor lands on the homepage and can't tell within a few seconds what the site sells, who it's for, or what to do next. The phone number's buried three pages deep, or there's no Contact link in the main menu at all. Good design puts the answer to "what is this and what do I do here" near the top of the page, and repeats the important links, contact details, pricing, whatever matters most, in the footer as a safety net for anyone who scrolled straight past.

Colour and typography

Colours picked because someone liked them, not because they work together, or a typeface chosen because it looked nice in a mockup, ignoring that body text set in a decorative font is a chore to actually read. Poor contrast is the usual culprit: grey text on a white background that looks fine on a bright monitor in a quiet office and is unreadable on a phone screen outdoors. Good design sticks to a small palette, two or three colours plus neutrals, uses one or two typefaces at most, and keeps text dark enough against its background that nobody has to squint.

Responsiveness

A site that only really works on a desktop monitor. On a phone the layout either doesn't reflow at all, so you're scrolling sideways to read a single sentence, or the menu covers half the screen and the buttons are too small to tap accurately with a thumb. Good design assumes most visitors are on a phone until proven otherwise, and checks that every page, not just the homepage, holds up on a small screen.

Weak or missing calls to action

A contact form with a button that just says Submit, or a "buy now" button in the same pale grey as everything else on the page, or no button at all, just a paragraph that trails off without telling the visitor what happens next. Most people won't bother working it out for themselves. Good design makes the next step obvious: a button that says what it does when you click it, in a colour that actually stands out from the rest of the page.

Load time

A page that takes far too long to appear because it's dragging in a stack of uncompressed photos and plugins nobody remembers installing. Most visitors won't wait around to find out whether the content was worth it – they'll just leave. Good design keeps images compressed, cuts anything that isn't earning its place, and treats speed as part of the design brief, not an afterthought left for whoever built the site to sort out later.

Every one of these is fixable without a full redesign. Run one of your own sites through these six checks – consistency, findability, colour and type, responsiveness, calls to action, load time – and you'll usually find at least one quick win.