25 ways not to design a website

Posted by David | Filed under Web Design Tips

Here are 25 ways you shouldn’t be designing a website, if your doing any of these then stop and think about whether what your doing is the best way of doing it!

  • Firstly don’t underline things, it may work when your writing a printable Word Document but in the web it can be confusing, people associate underlining a word with a hyperlink, if you underline words people may think it is a hyperlink and try and click on it, or even worse they may think a word is simply underlined when it is actually a hyperlink!
  • Keep the number of colours and fonts you use to a minimum, it doesn’t look good when a website is using about 10 different colours and five different fonts. Stick to 1 font and stick to a maximum of around 3 colours in a colour scheme, and stick to the scheme. Also ensure your colours are not clashing and that your fonts are both readable and present on everyone’s machine!
  • Don’t resize your images in the users browser, you will be wasting bandwidth and the time taken for your user to see the image will increase. Ensure that you have changed the picture to the right dimensions before uploading it.
  • If you use pictures remember to use alt tags. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, alt tags are important, they help people by telling them what is happening in an image as well as aiding a searching engine understand it as well.
  • Don’t use spaces to make tables, it looks really bad! If you want to make a table, make a table using HTML do not try and space things out by using the space bar. To start it often will look different on different browsers and at different resolutions. It is also just bad designing.
  • Don’t use hyphens or asterisks to make bullet points, use bullet points or numbers to do this using the correct HTML tags where appropriate.
  • Don’t use gimmicky gadgets like Banner Marquees unless they are really integrated well. They can look really naff. Definitely don’t overuse them, if there is more than one on a page you are overusing them.
  • Check your spelling and grammar afterwards. I admit mine is not perfect, but I try to ensure the spelling is all correct and the grammar as best I can do after a write an article! If I notice a mistake later on I always come in and correct it.
  • Don’t put weird backgrounds on your text or use backgrounds that will making reading your website hard work.
  • Regardless of your background colour make sure the text is readable, and make sure that it’s not too small to read either, it will really put your visitors off if they can’t see what your trying to say.
  • Try not to use sounds on your website unless the user can have control over it, the worst thing for a user is for them to be freaked out by some overly loud music they weren’t expecitng or some iritating music they can’t turn off without leaving your website.
  • Don’t get all flashy! Literally in this case, don’t make things hard for your users to read with flashing text or anything like that.
  • Don’t overuse Flash. Flash is Flash but its not always appropriate, use it sparingly. An entire website made out of Flash is often not a good idea.
  • Don’t link externally high up the page. If you want people to read your website then save external links for the bottom, even if you mention them. Otherwise they will be straight off and out of your site. Make sure external links also open in a new window, make sure you don’t lose any visitors!
  • Don’t write too much on one page and split it up with images to keep user attention. I would say  around 500 words a page is ample, after that consider a second page.
  • Don’t get lazy writing titles and descriptions, if you want your website to be found you can’t forget these things.
  • Don’t quote by copying a website, simply link to that website or write in your own words.
  • Don’t ruin your page with too much advertising, or adverts that take your user to another page, many users will get irritated and simply leave your site.
  • Don’t try and encourage users to your site with games or irrelevant content if that isn’t what your site is all about! You will be getting the wrong kind of visitors that way.
  • Avoid using alert boxes that pop-up when your user right clicks or left clicks, it gets annoying, and if someone is desperate to steal an image they can just use your HTML source anyway. If you want to protect your images put a watermark on them and using hotlink protection if necessary.
  • Avoid using automatic javascript or meta redirection, it can confuse users and search engines alike.
  • Don’t use “Click Here” as a hyperlink, its not useful to anyone, especially search engines – make your links have informative titles.
  • Don’t use code that will only work in selected browsers, you will forget after a while that many of your web users are missing out on the same experience.
  • Don’t use too many images on a page. Limit your image numbers, even thumbnails should have a limit. If the the page takes too long for the user to load they may well leave. Warn your users if you are going to link to a large image by telling them the size. Ensure that a low quality version is also available in these cases.
  • Don’t hotlink from another site. This means copying and pasting images directly from another site. This is a very bad habit of some amateur web designers, to start you shouldn’t be copying images really, but even if you do if they take the images off, move them or change the file names your website will be filled with those dreaded red X’s.

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Permalink | Comments (0) | Saturday, 16th Aug 2008

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