What NOT to do in building your site.
This article will discuss 10 Deadly Website Sins. Of course, there are many more, but these are some of the most irritating. Before you start thinking, “Well, well, aren’t we Ms. Webbier-Than-Thou,” let me say the reason I know these are mistakes is because I’ve made some of them myself. What’s more, I liked some of them a lot. Experience has taught me the error of my ways and I’ve reformed.
On the other hand, some of these things I’ve never done and would never consider doing. I hope you won’t either. Read on and see if you agree.
WEBSITE SIN #1: THOU SHALT NOT TAKE FOREVER TO DOWNLOAD
A site could provide the best content in the world, but if it takes too long to download no one will hang around long enough to view it. When visitors hit your site, they’re looking for information, services, or products. For the most part, they aren’t interested in that cool new graphic it took you a whole day to create. So perhaps it’s best to leave that beautiful 8X10 glossy of your latest product on the cutting-room floor.
Should you just deliver your information in a text-only, no frills format? Not unless you want to have single-digit daily site traffic. Strive for a balance between image quality and image size. There’s a happy medium where the image looks good and the file remains small enough to download fairly quickly. Your graphics should enhance the presentation of your information, not overpower it.
There are several image compression utilities online. Be sure to use the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes of the IMG tag, too!
WEBSITE SIN #2: THOU SHALT NOT USE PSYCHEDELIC COLORS
There’s nothing more frustrating than going to a website and finding that the information is unreadable due to poor background and text color choices. For a business site, you’d be hard pressed to find a more professional look than black text on a white background. Black on white provides the easiest readability.
If you choose to stray, make sure that there’s enough contrast between your text and background colors for visitors to read the content easily. Also, bear in mind that visitors must be able to read links and visited links against the background color. Although you can choose to change link colors, most people are familiar with the present default colors. Changing the color of links from the standard blue to, say, red is asking your visitors to work that bit harder to understand your site.
If you have a dark background tile and you’ve specified a light color text, your content might not be readable for visitors who are surfing with Image Loading OFF (depending on their default browser background color). To get around this problem, specify a background color in addition to a background image, such as:
WEBSITE SIN #3: THOU SHALT NOT BLINK!
This is a biggie. Please have some consideration and don’t use blinking text on your page. Believe me, people don’t like it. There’s nothing more distracting than trying to read with that incessant blinking going on.
This category includes those annoying little animated GIFs. Although it’s okay to sprinkle a few good animations here and there throughout your site, 20 animated Smurfs doing the Macarena on one page would be overdoing it. These have the same distracting effect as blinking text. If you simply must put some flashing, blinking, or fidgeting doo-dads on your page, have them do their thing twice and then stop!
WEBSITE SIN #4: THOU SHALT NOT FRAME!
Frames are the bane of every Web surfer’s existence. In theory, they’re great tools — in practice, they’re usually anything but. Although frames can provide a convenient navigation system for a site, most of the time they don’t.
Invariably, the dimensions are just a hair off and you’re stuck with that #$%# horizontal scrollbar or you have a window approximately five pixels high to try to scroll. Frames can also cause problems for some search engines in indexing your site.
WEBSITE SIN #5: BEWARE THE ENDLESSLY SCROLLING PAGE
Have you ever loaded a page and then watched in horror as the button on the horizontal scroll bar moves slower and slower? You know what that means, don’t you? The page is miles long and you’ve got a long way to go to get to the end of it.
It’s better to break your content up into short to medium length, linked pieces instead of one long page. Granted, it’s easier to put everything on one page, but it’s really a pain to have to scroll for days while reading. One executive found a site that was filled with great information, but when she decided to print it out she discovered that it would’ve been several hundred pages long.
WEBSITE SIN #6: THOU SHALT NOT LABEL THY SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION!
This one isn’t rocket science. If your site isn’t finished, don’t list it! I’m not talking about one section under development; that’s acceptable to most people. But when you submit your site to all the search engines and haven’t completed anything but the home page, you have a problem. It irritates visitors; they won’t bookmark your site and return in a few weeks just because they liked the cool graphics that you had.
A second cousin to “The Evil Blink!” is the animated “Under Construction” sign. Do we really need this? Isn’t it obvious when parts of a site are incomplete? Most good sites are perpetually “under construction” anyway. It’s more or less an unspoken law.
WEBSITE SIN #7: THOU SHALT NOT GET CARRIED AWAY BY BACKGROUND SOUND
This is another big no-no for professional sites; background sounds are more appropriate for a personal page. It’s essential to present a professional image for your business site. When you subject your visitors to Tata’s latest Top 10 hit, the old credibility meter starts veering toward “EMPTY.”
An exception to this rule might be a travel site, where excerpts of the local language or music would add a touch of atmosphere. However, please don’t make it loop indefinitely.
WEBSITE SIN #8: THOU SHALL BE CONSISTENT
A business site should keep its design/layout/navigation consistent throughout the site. Have you ever visited a site, clicked a link, and then wondered if you were still at the same site or if you’d moved to a different one?
I’d recommend using the same background and navigational items, in the same location, on every page throughout the site. This might sound boring, but it makes it far easier for visitors to find their way around.
WEBSITE SIN #9: THOU SHALT NOT DESIGN FOR A SPECIFIC BROWSER/COLOR SETTING/SCREEN RESOLUTION
Not everyone downloads the latest, greatest version of Internet Explorer or Firefox, so why make your site accessible only for those who do? You don’t want to design for browsers so old they can only read hieroglyphics. But don’t go to the opposite extreme and design only for people who upgrade their browsers every night before bed.
Along the same lines, don’t design for a specific color setting. Although your images might look great with 16 or 32 bit color, at 256 colors they might look as if they’ve been beaten with an ugly stick.
Last, but not least. Don’t design for a specific screen resolution. Not all of us have a monitor that would dwarf a small barn. Most visitors to my site have their screen resolution at 800x600. However, a significant number of people still run at 640x480. Designing specifically for higher screen resolution settings creates a horizontal scrollbar for those who have a lower resolution. If you’ve never experienced a horizontal scrollbar, thank your lucky stars. There’s nothing more infuriating than having to read, scroll a little to the right, read, scroll down, read, scroll a little to the right, read, scroll down … etc. You get the picture.
WEBSITE SIN #10: PROOFREAD!
Few things convey a less professional image than spelling or HTML errors. Building trust is an absolute must online. What kind of message do you think visitors get from a Web page riddled with spelling and grammatical errors?
HTML goofs are another way to evaporate any faith the visitor might’ve had in your ability, especially if you’re offering website design services. If you’ve left out your ending tag and 3/4 of your page is in bold text, things are looking bad for you from the get-go.
The strange thing is that these types of mistakes are relatively easy to avoid. Just proofread your pages and do a spell-check before you upload them. If you’re not into editing, get a friend to do it for you or outsource the job.
I hope this article has helped trigger some ideas for ways to improve your site. Good luck!