Business Site Design Cliches

I have seen many pro­fes­sional sites for businesses/organizations, and there are a cou­ple of design cliches to avoid.

Stock Pho­tos

So many com­pa­nies think that by adding some pic­tures of two employ­ees (that don’t work for the com­pany) sit­ting at a com­puter smil­ing will some­how make peo­ple more inter­ested. Well, it doesn’t, and the abuse of stock pho­tog­ra­phy in busi­ness designs has got­ten out of control.

Splash Pages

Well, this one is for any site, but pro­fes­sional sites fall prey to have some ‘cute’ splash page with an ani­ma­tion or vision explanation.

Writ­ing for Microsoft Word and Not the Web

It’s amaz­ing how many pro­fes­sional sites think they need a white paper on their front page. Put down MS Word for a sec­ond, and think about how peo­ple read on the web. If you need an exam­ple then write con­tent more suited for Pow­er­Point then Word.

Lack of Unity in Mar­ket­ing Materials

It seems like many com­pa­nies hire com­pletely dif­fer­ent peo­ple to do dif­fer­ent aspects of their mar­ket­ing. Try and stick with on firm and design in design­ing all your mar­ket­ing materials.

The Busi­ness Tagline Stinks

Using a busi­ness tagline and dis­play­ing it promi­nently is not a bad thing; unfor­tu­nately, most of them suck big time. Be suc­cinct, yet full and descrip­tive (eas­ier said then done right?).

Abus­ing DHTML

When I speak of DHTML abuse for this genre I’m speak­ing mostly of DHTML nav­i­ga­tion. Most com­pa­nies don’t think through their IA enough to where they can avoid drop-downs. Sec­ondly, most of these imple­men­ta­tions are also poor at best.

No Typo­graph­i­cal Unity

We’ve all seen those pro­fes­sional doc­u­ments where they seemed to want to put as many fonts as pos­si­ble (and vary­ing sizes) in the same doc­u­ment. Well, it’s time to learn serif and sans-serif and how they look together.

Are there any I missed?