Common mistakes when building a website
A quick search will yield thousands upon thousands of websites with tutorials on how to build websites, most offer solid concepts and ideas, but which teach you why and how you should do things? Moreover, how do you know your design and coding is in the best interest of your client and the viewer of the site? Here’s a list of common mistakes made in web design so you can avoid them when building your own site.
Leave the visitor’s web browser alone! Don’t force a new window to open and don’t resize it. Sure, it frames the content you’re coding perfectly but it’s a total disservice to your viewers and leaves a bad taste in the mouth of them.
Skip the welcome screen. The welcome screen or Enter Here screen is 100% pointless and serves no purpose for your website viewer, regardless of cool you might think it looks. Furthermore, because no content is on it, it looses ranking in search engines. Aside from being a web design mistake, it’s an SEO mistake too.
Let the visitor turn music on. Never force your visitor to listen to music, they might be in a public place that it’s not appropriate for music to play or may just not care for it. Either way let them decide if they want to listen to it or not.
Don’t forget the contact page. An emerging trend recently is the lack of a contact page. I don’t know how this happens, but it’s one of the most important pieces of nearly any web design.
Use readable fonts in graphic design elements. Because the number of fonts that can be used as plain text is very limited for the Internet, many web designers create graphical elements to represent fancy text into site designs. Make sure they are not too big or too small and are easily readable. No sense in creating content that no one can read.
Test your site in multiple browses and at multiple screen resolutions to ensure it not only works, but also is readable across all. Horizontal scrolling is not an acceptable way to view a page it just never caught on. Most web designers are smart enough to not use Internet Explorer as their default browser but it’s still installed on millions of computers, spending the time to double check it works can be crucial to the site traffic and flow.
Never use pop-ups. For that matter, never use pop-unders either. Advanced web browsers like Firefox block almost all of these by default but visitors to sites don’t want to be forced to to another window. Tabbed browsing is available in all browsers – pop-ups are dead.
Avoiding these common web design mistakes will ensure your site keeps traffic and is readable, fresh and fun for all who visit it.