You ever land on a website and instantly feel… irritated?

Like something’s off, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it?

Yeah. Your users feel that too.

In this episode, I’m calling out the website design habits that quietly push people away — the unnecessary animations, the chaotic menus, the inconsistent images, the confusing links, and all the things we think look clever but actually make visitors hate being on our sites.

And I’m not ranting for the sake of it. These choices cost you enquiries, sales, and trust.

We’ll talk through why these habits creep in, what they’re doing to your user experience, and the simple fixes that make your site feel cleaner, calmer, and more professional (without stripping out your creativity).

If you build websites for clients — or you’re guilty of “just adding one more animation” — this one’s for you.

Come and find out more at websitesmadesimple.co.uk or email me at [email protected]

Skip to the good bits:

00:00 "Over-Animating Websites: A Problem"

04:54 "Traditional Header Menus Matter"

08:36 "Clear Clickable Navigation Tips"

13:34 Create a Brand Kit Now

14:37 "Website Design and SEO Insights"

Mentioned in this episode:

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Go to https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/masterclass

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You know when you're on a website and something just doesn't feel

right, it feels a little bit niggly and

you start to feel that no matter how great the product or

the service is, that you're just not going to buy from this website

because just something doesn't add up. Over

animating everything. Oh my goodness.

We've all had that experience. Whether that's landing on a

client's website and they've clearly self built and

it's time for a rebuild, or whether we've followed one of those

meta ads and we go on the website and think, oh yeah,

there's no great shakes here. You get about halfway down the page and you think,

oh, this isn't the right one for me. Whatever it is.

There's a consistency in

bad practice amongst the website design community

that I'm going to call out here because honestly, we

can do so much better than this if people don't like it. Haters going to

hate. Make any money from my personal blog. So it's a really nice.

Hi and welcome to another episode of Websites Made

simple with Holly Christie. That's me. I am a website

designer, a website designer mentor and I

am here to help you have a career that you absolutely love.

All without losing your mind or dropping the ball.

You ready? Let's get started.

So today I particularly wanted to tackle

these things I really, really wish we would stop doing on

websites. And by we I mean you, because I stopped doing this a very long

time ago and my website's got a heck of a lot better

for it. So.

Number one, and this be a tricky one

because this could be a client directive but

over animating everything. Oh my

goodness. You know when you're scrolling on a website and the text

appears and then the images fly in and then you have this and then you

have that and then you scroll down the page and something else happens and every

part of the website is animated. First

of all, it's not a good end user experience. Now

I'm sure that you probably know that people report that

it can make them feel a little bit seasick as well. And it

can be a frustrating experience because sometimes people just

want to get to the information. In fact, I recently

did a webinar with Jo Watson who is an

incredible copywriter and we really talked about we

don't need to see the thesis, we need to know, you know, the highlights of

something and how we can buy it. And it's harder

to navigate and get to that if things are

swooping in and flying out. It just, it does not

give a relaxing experience for people. So animate,

occasionally animate small areas.

Like sometimes if I have kind of a container with testimonials drop in,

I might put them together so they're like puzzle pieces, so they drop

in and out into the side and stuff. But it's an animation that happens once

and once on a page as well. So if you do have to animate

stuff, try and go for once per page.

Trust me, the users who are going to be going on that website, they

will thank you for it. If you have a lot of animation on your own

website, turn it off. It is not something

that people think, oh, I love the animation on that. You know,

this is what's going to make me buy from that person. It just doesn't happen.

And a positive side of it is that you will see

your Google page speed scores go up as well, because animation

slows things down.

My second thing I absolutely would love to

see the back of is really funky menus. And

trust me, I am someone who loves experimenting, I love

creating, I love playing around with these things. In fact, when

I did my simply sites, when I first set them up, gosh, nearly four years

ago now, I had really funky menus in them especially. I

had particularly one that was a shop and it had like the

logo kind of in the middle of this header image and it had a menu

that kind of expanded and kind of looked a bit like an ice cream cone.

It was perfection. Every single person who bought that template, and a

lot of people bought it, were like, I can't really get the menu working. People

don't know how to look at this and they can't get back to there or

whatever else. And I went on to do some research and

it was that people and Google and the other

search engines want a menu that is

predictable. This is at the top of the page which

has proper names on them, like home, about

services, contact, that sort of thing,

testimonials, rather than things like praise or good thoughts

or vibes or, you know, whatever people are putting out there. A

traditional header menu will always, always do you

really well on a desktop version of a website and

actually even a tablet version of a website. These days with the

resolution of tablet screens. When we were first designing for tablets,

like a million years ago when they first came out, we would make

the tablet menu very similar to the

mobile menus and that's because the resolution on tablets were quite

low. So it kind of worked better. But now you just get amazing

tablets and they should have that expanded desktop menu as

well, something really traditional. I mean,

people are always going to have a difference of opinion on whether you

have home about services, blah, blah, blah, contact or whether

you have home services, blah, blah, blah, about contact.

For me, I'm quite traditional. I like home and about. And we know

regardless, that people do not navigate websites

in a linear fashion. They don't start particularly in a kind of

country where they read from left to right as well. They don't start with home

on the left and work their way through clicking everything until they get to contact

on the right. You know they're going to jump around. And actually, if you have

a proper link structure, which I'm going to talk about in this episode as well,

it particularly means that people won't be navigating in

a linear fashion as well. Use your

creativity to get creative in other places

and leave that menu at the top of the page.

Speaking of the top of the page, please. I

personally, this is the hill that I will die on. Every

website should have a sticky menu. No exceptions.

There are so many websites out there like that I land

on weekly that you go on the website, the menu looks

great, you scroll down the page, the menu's gone. You get about halfway down the

page and you think, oh, this isn't the right one for me. And you have

to go all the way back up to the top to get the menu. No,

you really, really need to make it sticky. It is a really small

change. It's a massively quick win. It gives a

better user experience and people are going to stay on the website for longer

because of it, because they can easily navigate without having to put

in extra work, extra scroll time of going up

to the top there. I know it sounds like just such a small,

kind of petty thing to really go on about, but it makes a massive

difference in how long people actually stay on your website. So

really do make it something that you go on to do.

So now we come onto the proper link structure and I, I

was so delighted to have Nikki Pilkington, who is an SEO

specialist, on a webinar with me recently. And if you'd like the links

to any of the webinars, do get in touch with me at

helloebsitesmadesimple.co.uk. i will be delighted

to share them with you. And Nikki is a really

big player in the SEO industry and she was talking

about one of the most important things that you can do for

SEO purposes is to have a proper link structure on your website.

And remember, when we look at links. We're looking at linking

text from one page to another. We're looking at buttons. They're

also links. We're looking at your navigation menu, your

sticky navigation menu that's at the top there. Those are also

links. Also, think carefully about

whether you choose to have columns that link

on clicks, whether you choose to have images or videos that take you

somewhere else when you click, or whether you choose to have icons that take you

somewhere else when you click. I am again

going to be quite old school here. I've been in this industry a really long

time and I am going to say for SEO, for

accessibility, for search engines, but for your user experience

on that website, you really need to make sure

that what people click is very, very obvious. I was on a

website the other day, someone had really nicely

laid out icons, you know, a column with an icon in it and then the

content. And you had to click the icon to get

to the content, but it didn't tell you that you had to click the content.

I only knew because I'd hovered over it and then of course, my

cursor changed to tell me to do that. That's really bad for

accessibility. It's really bad for your SEO. It's a really bad

user experience as well. And I know it can feel frustrating to

have to put a button or a link text or something like that,

but if you think how many people go on websites who actually have

issues, maybe with fine motor control or they have

vision issues, something like that. We want to make sure our websites are as

inclusive as possible. Not just because Google would

like that, but because we have a moral responsibility to do so.

So do make sure you have a proper link structure all

across your website and your users will thank you for it.

Google will reward you for it. And you will have a really good,

robust website as well. You're just going to have to check those links regularly

to make sure they all work all of the time as well.

We are all guilty of this one. And I am going to throw my hands

up and say, I am guilty of this too, particularly if I'm on a dev

site. And I will go back and change it and go for consistency.

Just chucking any old image into the website and you think, oh, I'll just

try this here. And you don't label it and you

don't reduce the size of it and you don't compress it, and it might not

even be a relevant image either. And

that's something that I've done myself. And then I have to Quickly

kind of comb through and take out before I send the website live.

And I'll often do it if I am testing

an image or a concept or a design. But of course what happens is I'll

put something in there to test it, and that's going into the database

and the size with the labeling, with everything else it has in

regardless as to whether I go and use it. And I don't want my database

to have a lot of irrelevant images or a lot of really large images.

What can often happen will be that a client will then

say, oh, yeah, that's great. And they sign off that section. You think, oh, brilliant,

I'll move on. That image gets completely forgotten

about. All your website will be webp images and then you'll have a couple of

JPEGs or PNG files that are just hogging all the space there,

just providing that kind of inconsistency there as well. So make sure

that the images that you use, that they're relevant, that they're

the right size, that they're compressed, that they're the same right

format, and that they have been labeled correctly as well.

My final one, and it's a biggie, I'm gonna say that

is inconsistent design. So

we can, as creatives have a tendency

to think, I want to try everything or

this, oh, I read this bit in there about section and it would be so

cool to do this thing here. I've been there.

Luckily, I tend to go there with like my personal blog or

something like that. And I think, well, you know, if. If people don't like

it, haters gonna hate. I don't make any money from my personal blog, so it

doesn't really matter. But when it comes to websites you are

building for people to get work from and in the industry and

stuff, you're gonna want to be really consistent with your design.

I mean, obviously in an ideal world, we all work with

a brand kit as well. So we all have direction of what we're doing

with the design. The brand kit should be more

than just the logo and the hex colors for the brand.

The brand kit should have any icons you're going to use or

suggestions for icons. It should have backgrounds if there's going

to be things like gradient backgrounds and all different things like that.

It should have a mood board in there for the style images

and the vibe and the feel that you're going for. And of course, it should

have the font files as well. So it should be

this really robust document that you work off. And if

you have clients who come or you might have your own

websites and you think, I've done the branding myself, I don't

have a whole brand kit per se. There is nothing stopping

you from creating a brand kit for yourself. And if

your client doesn't have one, it's really good to kind of get

them on a call and just talk them through the concepts of, of some of

this stuff and ask them to put a mood board together as well.

Yeah, they can do that on Pinterest. They can add different kind of

images and colors and blog posts and stuff like that on there.

And it is going to make working on their website so

much easier for you. It's going to give all of you a better experience

as well, because you're all kind of working to the same vibe and it's going

to provide that consistency that can sometimes wander off when we don't

have these kind of really tight, controlled outcomes there as well.

So make sure your design is super consistent as well, because

it's one of the big things that Google, your search engines are

looking for and they're looking for these based on. Yet

they know how people are navigating websites, the websites

people are clicking through, spending time on, the websites people are

buying from, and they know that consistency

is one what gets people staying on websites. And so it's one of their

criteria for SEO is a really good consistent design.

So that's all from me today. Feels like a bit of a grab and pee

episode, actually. It feels a little bit like, ha. These are all the things I

hate people doing on websites. I would love to hear

from you about what you hate people doing on websites as well. What

things really irritate you? I would love to know whether you

agree with the stuff that we've talked about today.

Which one's the one that you agree with the most? For

me, it's always going to be the menus. Always, always make sure if you take

anything away from this podcast, go and make those menus sticky.

And until next time, have a great time in your website career.