Avoid these obvious website mistakes

Make Website Smarter

The following should be used at absolute minimum. Better yet, if possible, they should be completely avoided.

Extra large/small text size
There is more to web design than purely graphics -- user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's illegible you won't be selling anything!

Popup windows
Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that 90% of popup windows are not worth watching on your screen. Imagine you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

Background music
Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. Moreover, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed. If you do have to have music, just make sure not to set to auto play - let the viewers walk their mouse.

Again, the webmaster should minimize, if not outright avoid, the following items on the website. The reason is that the web spiders sent out by search engines cannot - not these days anyway - to follow the link embedded in the image.

Splash Page - Your homepage is probably your website highest ranking page and gets crawled frequently by web spiders. Your internal pages will not appear in the search engine index without the proper linking structure to internal pages for the spider to follow. Your homepage should include - at minimum - target keywords and links to important pages. Take a look at this.

Splash Menu - Many designers build Flash menus such as those fade-in and animated menus. The reality is that they cannot be seen by the search engines; and thus the links in the Flash menu will not be followed.

Flash-filled content - The same reason here. The content should be all text. If you show Flash, have a separate text-based link about it so that web spiders can follow it.

Overuse of Javascript and Ajax - If you really want to impress the visitors and make them come back, interesting and informative fresh content is the key for that. Whatever you have in a Javascript is not expanded by the browser. If you view the source file of your page where you have used Ajax and/or Javascript, you would know that they are not expanded on the server. Because Ajax content is loaded dynamically, it is not indexed by search engines.

Descriptive link text - Have a link that is descriptive of what it is about. Do not use click here or such words.

One title tag for all pages - Every page on your website should have a unique <title> tag with the target keywords in it.

65 Character limit - Have your title never go overboard. The limit should be 65 characters.

Alt attribute - You should always describe your image in the alt attribute. Search engines cannot see images so your alt attribute is a factor in illustrating what your page is relevant for.

Be consistent With Your Domain URL - Decide how you would refer to your domain URL. If you use complete address such as http://www.mywebsiteworkout.com, then always use that. Do not use, then, something like http://mywebsiteworkout.com.

Using any black hat techniques - such as cloaking, hidden text, or doorway pages. (Google lists some forbidden techniques at google.com/support/webmasters.)

Confusing - the more direct and straightforward, the better. Clear & concise.

Poor use of HTML tables - color, text, borders all come into play

Spelling/Grammar mistakes - be careful even when you are blogging

Poor organization & overall appearance - work it out on a sheet of paper

No Contact Us information - always have contact us as menu item

No About Us page - always have about us in the menu

Poor load time - this happens when you have lots of videos, images and such

Over use of JavaScripts - try using JavaScripts to a minimum

Inconsistent page design - be consistent with menus, background color etc.

Poor content - quality is the name of the game

Broken HTML and graphics code links - check them now and then

Poor browser compatibility - a link is given in Website Development for validation.

Large Welcome & Flashing banners

Under construction signs

Scrolling text in the status bar

Large scrolling text across the page

Poor use of HTML code frames

Large fonts

Poor use of mouseover effect