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?