Common Web Designing Mistakes

I have mentioned here a few mistakes that are commonly made by web designers:

1. Frames: A few years ago, frames were the in thing. They allowed one or two parts of your site stay constant while only one frame changed.As a result people used to use them for fast loading of pages.But with the growing popularity of search engines, it became a known fact that Framed sites were not being properly indexed.

   When a search bot visits a site with frames it indexes only the main frame ignoring all the other frames, leading to sites with frames dropping rapidly in search engine rankings. This is one of the reasons why frames are no longer popular.

   Another reason is that bookmarking a site with frames is not easy.

2. Page Title: Most designers leave their page title as ‘Welcome to Mysite.com’. Now this is a very bad idea as it depends almost entirely on the page title whether or not a visitor clicks on your site on a search result. Your page title should be a very short description of your site.Most search engines only displays a part of a long page title, so make sure you keep it below 65 characters.
3. Page size: Huge pages take too much time to load and thus you could loose visitors. Keep your page sizes less than 100 KB.
4. Flash: Using Flash on your site to make it more attractive is a good idea but make sure you keep an eye on its size. Flash based sites are not spidered and thus it tends to loose visitors.Always remember that text loads before graphics and most people will scan through whatever appears on your site first and decides whether the content is what they are searching for. Even if you have relevant contents neatly dispalyed using Flash menus, many people may not stick around long enough to see this.

   If you have Flash intros on your site, make sure you include a ‘Skip Intro’ option.

   The loading time problems will no longer be a problem once everyone starts using broadband.

5. Colors: I have seen many web sites use colors that don’t match. It only proves that the designer does not have a good color sense.:idea: Tip: Choose a color (preferbly your sites logo color) and use its dark and light versions. If you decide to go for a dark background then use light text and dark text for a light background.

   A white background with black text is universally considered the most readable.

   You must always use Web safe colors on your site. You can use the Web safe color table from here.

6. Outdated Pages: You should always update the content on your site. A site that was last updated over a couple of months will loose visitors.
7. Navigation: Many times I have come across sites that have poor navigation. All pages of your site should be linked to your homepage and other major sections of your site. Create a navigation bar and use it on all pages of your site.
8. Animations: Marquees, like frames, are outdated and are not considered as good design anymore.Even Animated GIF images should not be used much. They are considered as advertisements by many. They will only make your site look unprofessional.
9. Tables: Yes, tables are outdated too. Tables make our pages load slowly. Use XHTML with CSS and your site will be much faster.
10. Images: Images help make our site more attractive. But always make sure you optimize its size by reducing the number of colors. You can do this with programs like Adobe Photoshop.Use the height and width attribute of the image tag so that pages won’t have to wait till the image is loaded completely.

    Use JPG for Photographs and GIF for artwork.

11. Javascript: Javascript helps to add more functionality to our site. But too much of it will increase page load time.
12. Music: A light music in the background is fine but keep an eye on its size.
13. Browser Support: Most web designers only check their designs on their favorite browser. Your visitors may be using another browser so check your designs in all major browsers like IE, Firefox, Opera and others. Also, it is a good idea to check your designs on Lynx, a text-based browser in Linux, to see how it will look like to a search engine bot.
14. Scroll bars: In professional web designing, scroll bars should not be visible on the homepage especially horizontal scrollbar. Homepages should fit the screen. To prevent scrollbars you can design your homepage at a resolution of 770 x 434 pixels.
15. Contents: I have seen many websites that take a lot of time to load just because they have included a lot of graphics. There should be a fine balance between text and graphics.A good rule of thumb is the ratio of 80:20, i.e, 80% text to 20% graphics.
16. Advertisements: Advertisements are not part of web designing. I have mentioned them here because a lot of people are using them to earn extra money. Just make sure you don’t clutter your pages with a lot of advertisements.Text based advertising is much better than image based ones. Animated advertisements are disliked by many and you could loose visitors using them. I recommend Google AdSense as their ads are based on the content of the web page

What other mistakes can a Web Designer make? Please share your tips here via comments.

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