Absolutely Horrible Site Designs You Want to Avoid

1. Framed web-sites - These were a good idea once, or so some people tell us! There are, or at least were, a number of reasons for designing websites in frames. But keep away from them at all costs. You might have a global navigation in an include file, so that excuse has gone. If you want to include something for instance a third party form you could use an iframe on the relevant page. But there is no need to frame an entire website - it makes it harder for search engines to crawl your web site and visitors cannot bookmark your pages.

2. Not testing on different browsers & screens - As the internet develops and moves on, so does people’s choice of browser. Yes, based on my own research maybe round half the world users several form of Internet Explorer, but a third use Firefox. And if you only test on one version of Internet Explorer your web site might not work on other versions, or fail on Firefox or other browsers. The same goes for developing in a widescreen screen and ignoring the majority of the population on smaller screens.

3. A load of flash, masses of colour, heaps of movement - It might be clever and take stacks of time, but the finished result looks over the top, amateurish and very off putting. As tempting as falling snowflakes and a mouse trailing shooting stars might seem, stay away from them as they went out years ago.

4. Forget splash pages - Why do you think your visitors want to sit through an introductory page every time that they decide to visit your site? Do they really want to sit through a 10 minute presentation of why you are the best in your field, with a ball bouncing round the screen to explode the reasons out of nowhere? Again, it is far too clever and time consuming and has a negative effect. Just get your customers straight to where they want to be - remember you have seconds to impress them, not minutes.

5. Over optimise a site through putting every keyword in bold, underlined and italic - Using every bit of emphasis that you could does not alert the search engines to the fact that these are the correct search terms for your site, instead it alerts them to the fact that you are more than optimising. And by poor use of these techniques the page becomes unreadable. Instead, use these features to highlight key areas and titles to help readers find their way through your site.

6. Forget to read and test your website - A visitor will not like reading a page that is full of real clangers of spelling mistakes that stand out a mile or a page in which several of the links when clicked on produce error pages. Ensure that everything is correctly spelled and that all links are working.

7. Clashing colours and over the top backgrounds - They might be eyecatching and grab attention, but backgrounds that compete with the main area of the website distract attention and clashing or too many colours are equally distracting.

Article Source: http://www.gambling-articles.org

Written by Keith Lunt, who offers a Formby web design service. For more useful tips, call into the website design tips blog.

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