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September 27, 2006
1. Using a Graphic Laden Design:
A web page should load in a reasonable amount of time. If you use too many graphics, or graphics that are not scaled and saved in the most efficient format, your pages will take longer to load. Impatient users may bail out and go to another site. Clean and fast should be the goal. You can usually make a very nice layout using HTML and CSS without the whole page being a sliced up graphic. Of course, I've built sites for people who insisted on pages based entirely on graphics and in that case I usually try to get the Adobe Photoshop files from the graphic artist and slice them and save the slices myself. This way I can mix and match file formats. For example sections with few colors can be saved as gifs which are usually very small, especially if you tweak the number of colors. Sections that contain more colors or photographs work best as jpg image files. Warning: mixing file types like this can cause some issues that you should be aware of: colors may not match exactly between a gif and a jpg. For example if you have a background color in both, you may have trouble getting a gif and jpg to look seamless because of slight color shifts.
2. Using Poor Color Choices:
Just because it looks cool to you, doesn't mean everyone will find it easy to read. Test your color choices out on a mix of people before you get too far into your design. You don't want to turn people away just because they have trouble reading your site or it makes them nauseous! In addition, there are colors for backgrounds and text that perform better than others for some types of sites. For example, if you have an Internet business there are color choices and layouts that perform much better for sales pages than others. Do your research!
3. Using Too Many Animated Graphics:
You want your visitors to concentrate on whatever your site is about. Don't make your pages look like the arcade at an amusement park with animated gifs everywhere. A little animation goes a long way.
4. Flash Splash Screens:
Flash is big these days and is very useful for a lot of tasks; however, one thing you should avoid is a big flash welcome page as the default page of your web site. Most people find it very annoying to sit through it, or to have to click a skip button.
5. Cross Browser Compatible Issues:
Always check out your site on the main browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera) a PC and Mac (Safari, Firefox) if possible. You'd be surprised how each web browser has its quirks. Sometimes a page will look really bad or completely wrong in one browser and you will need to spend time correcting the problem. But, you won't know unless you test it... don't rely on your visitors to tell you, they won't - they'll just go elsewhere.
6. Broken Links:
This one should be obvious, check you site's navigation and all the links occasionally. There are tools available to do this for you if you have a really large site.
7. Poor Navigation Design:
Have someone that's not familiar with your site try to locate something, or get them to place an order, or find the page for sending in support questions, etc. Watch them but don't show them. Fix any problems they encounter.
8. Incomplete Contact Information:
Keep the contact information on your site is current and complete. Do this as soon as anything changes - it's too easy to forget and then realize a year later, as you're shutting down your Internet business, that your phone number was wrong or missing.
9. Text in Graphics to Make "Pretty" vs. Real Text:
The font styles that browsers support are somewhat limited for web pages. Some people want their site to look really pretty with fonts like those in Microsoft Word or other word processor packages. So how do you do that? You make it in Adobe PhotoShop or another graphic package and save out your text, words, paragraphs, etc as images. This works really well as far as looking good, however, there are two problems with using images of text vs. real text. Because images are larger than text, the pages load slower. But the biggest drawback is that you have your text, which tells what your site is about, locked up in images. It's not accessible to search engines that crawl web sites and catalog them. What does that mean? It means that if you're relying on getting traffic to your site from search engines, you want real text on your site that search engines can read, not images of text that only humans can read. If your site is not dependant on search engine traffic, then this may not matter other than the slower load time for the image laden pages.
10. Using Something Just To Be Using It:
When we remodeled our house, I wanted to use some stone somewhere. Our contractor kept saying that if we did, it would look like we used stone just to use some stone; it wouldn't look natural like a house designed from the start with stone. The same is true of web sites. Don't use flash, or background sounds, or videos that automatically load and start playing, or JavaScript that opens 900 windows. Only use those things when they are necessary, don't use them just because you may know how and want to show off.
11. Failing to Update Your Site Regularly:
As you or your organization changes, as people come and go, you should modify your site. If you add a new product or announce new products, etc. you should add them to your site. Your web site can be a tremendous internet marketing tool for any type of business, but especially for an Internet business. But not if it's stale and outdated. Keep it fresh and current.
I hope that this information will help you make your web site better, more profitable, and more enjoyable for your visitors. Check out my products and courses listed in the right hand column to make your web site and Internet business a success.
Sincerely,
Fred
Posted by Fred on September 27, 2006 | Printer-Friendly
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