The Top 10 Signs Of A Web designers First Web Site

This article discusses 10 common mistakes made by a novice web designer. Avoid these and your site will look more professional and provide your visitors with a much better experience. Your website needs to be effective and produce results. It is often the first contact with you or your business, so make sure it portrays the right image.


1. Poor Navigation

Providing good website content and making it easy for people to find, is a key ingredient of website success. The common rule is your best content should not be more than 3 clicks away. Remember, you only have 2 – 3 seconds for your site visitor to make up their mind if they want to read your website or not. Think about why people are visiting your site and make it very easy for them to find what they are looking for.

2. Your site uses frames and makes no effort to address all the problems

Frames are most often a very bad idea these days. They were great back in the days before search engine optimization, CSS, and all the other tools web designers have at their disposal today. Now, they make pages hard to bookmark, cause problems with refreshing a page, search engine links, and can break printing, among other things. Be very, very sure of how you plan on addressing all the problems they cause before you decide to use them, and weigh the benefits carefully. There is probably a better way to accomplish what you want by using another method.

3. Spelling and grammatical errors

Make sure you spell-check your content. Spell-check doesn’t catch many common mistakes, such as the difference between ‘too’, ‘to’, and ‘two’. Or the difference between ‘effect’ and ‘affect’. Or missing apostrophes. But your more intelligent readers will. Proof read it, proof read it again and again.

4. Your page has neon green as a background and bright red text

Loud colours often scare people off. Gear your web design to your audience. It is proven that websites with dark colour backgrounds and strange font types are much harder to read. Try to use white or pastel colours for the background and dark colours such as blue for the font. Sans serif and Arial are also good font types.

5. Your page only works correctly in Microsoft Internet Explorer

Microsoft does not dominate the browser market as it once did, so your website needs to be tested in many different ones. A few of the choices out there are Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome. Unfortunately, even though there are supposed to be standards, your website will display differently in different browsers. So before you publish make sure you have tested these and corrected any errors.

6. Animations. Lots of cute animations

Animations and clip art look amateurish and add nothing to your website design. Your visitors will know where you have got them from and it is just not necessary these days. With sites such as flickr.com available today, you can get high quality images for your website for free.

7. Pages have “under construction” signs

’Under Construction’ signs just look unprofessional. If a page doesn’t have content yet, say so and give an approximate timeframe for visitors to check back. Even better, don’t put up pages that aren’t ready for public viewing.

8. Scrolling text appears on the page or in the scrollbar

Unless you are using a newsfeed or something similar and space is limited, get rid of the scrolling text. It is hard to read and is a tell, tell sign of a beginners website. It gets attention, but unfortunately not the good kind.

9. A big graphical counter sits on the bottom of your page

Graphical counters do nothing for you. If you want website statistics, your website hosting company should provide these for you. Most hosts have comprehensive statistical software within their control panel, and these give you detailed visitor information. If they don’t, please use an invisible counter.

10. MIDI or other music/sound files are embedded in your web page

Nothing annoys a visitor more than sound that plays and they can’t control it. They might be listening to something already or they might be somewhere that they didn’t want sound to broadcast (i.e. work or a library). If you want them to hear it, provide a link to turn the sound ON, not off, or offer them a way to download the file.