Universal web design is the kind of design that meets the needs and requirements of the widest possible audience. The principles of website designing that help give shape to universal web design include:
 

• Ensuring that it can be used by people with diverse abilities.
   
• Its needs to be able to accommodate a varied amount of individual preferences.
   
• The focus must be on simplicity and intuitiveness.
   
• It must be able to deliver pertinent information in a highly effective manner.
   
• It must tolerate a certain amount of error.
   
• It must require very little physical or mental effort on the part of the user to understand it and optimize its use.
   
• The design should be able to meet all contextual requirements of the user.

But sometimes even the best intentioned website designers can ignore the key aspects that can make or break universal website design. These are the kind of mistakes that should never be made as website visitors won’t be able to ignore them.

Let’s take a look at some of these mistakes.

Problem with Readability

If the textual content is not easily readable, the effectiveness of the website’s design goes down a few notches. This means that website visitors will have to strain themselves in order to read the content, which goes against the principles of universal website design. Some of the mistakes that make the content difficult to read include, small text size, using inappropriate font style, and improper color contrast. Other problems that can equally affect readability of text include are not focusing on user friendly headings and not giving enough importance to ample line or paragraph spacing.

Unconventional Looking Text Links

When it comes to text links, going by convention is the key. Otherwise, website visitors will find it difficult to determine a text link. The long standing convention in web browsing is that a hyperlinked text must have an underline. There are some smart designers who think it’s a good idea to not adhere to this convention and try and define a link a little differently, by highlighting it with a marked color contrast or using a darker color from the surrounding text. But, the whole idea behind underling a hyperlink is to help website visitors easily distinguish it. It’s a familiar differentiating factor that website visitors have come to expect and if they don’t find such links, they are going to be confused. A website design that confuses a visitor can never be considered universal.

A lot of visual noise

Have you heard a noise that doesn’t make a sound? No, this isn’t a joke, there is something called a visual noise that makes a website unappealing, unusable and inaccessible. If the website design looks scattered all over the place, it means that there is a lot of visual noise that is interfering with the website visitor’s ability to make sense of the website design. If the website has no focal point and a complete lack of visual hierarchy, the user will be left scrambling for answers on the website. A website’s design should be a coming together of diverse design elements that make perfect sense. If these design elements appear crammed together in the layout, the design looks disjointed and doesn’t appear to make much sense. The result is the kind of visual noise that we can do well without.

These three mistakes can cost universal web design big time, and a web design company must ensure that it doesn’t commit these cardinal mistakes. If they are avoided, the result is a universal web design; but if they are committed, the result is a non performing web design. The equation is very simple.