 11 Common Mistakes People Make When Creating Web Pages
Here's an outstanding educational piece that will help anyone improve their online marketing. Follow these simple tips for creating web pages and you'll see a difference in your results...
11 Common Mistakes People Make When Creating Web Pages [Don't Do These!]
1. Graphic Laden.
A web page should load in a reasonable amount of time. If you use too many graphics, or graphics that are not scaled and saved in an efficient format, your pages will take too long to load. Impatient users will bail out and go to another site. Clean and fast should be your goal when making web pages. You can usually make a very nice layout using HTML and CSS without the whole page being a sliced up graphic. Of course I’ve built sites for people who insisted on pages based entirely on graphics and in that case I usually try to get the Adobe Photoshop files from the graphic artist and slice them and save the slices myself. This way I can mix and match file formats. For example, sections with few colors can be saved as gifs which are usually very small, especially if you tweak the number of colors. Sections that contain more colors or photographs work best as jpg image files. Mixing file types like this, especially of slices of the same image, can cause issues that you should be aware of: colors may not match exactly between a gif and a jpg. For example if you have a background color in the images of adjoining cells you may have trouble getting a gif and jpg to look seamless because of slight color shifts.
2. Poor Color Choices.
Just because it looks cool to you doesn’t mean everyone will find it easy to read. Test your color choices out on a mix of people before you get too far into your design. You don’t want to turn people away just because they have trouble reading the text on your site. There are colors for backgrounds and text that perform better than others for some types of sites, do your research!
3. Too Many Animated Graphics.
You want your visitors to concentrate on whatever your site is about. You don’t want your pages look like the arcade at an amusement park with animated gifs everywhere. A little animation goes a long way.
4. Flash Welcome/Splash Screens.
Flash is big these days and very useful for a lot of tasks, however, one thing you want to avoid is to put a big flash welcome page as the default page of your web site. Most people find it annoying. Their time is valuable and to make them sit through it, or have to click a skip button is just irritating.
5. Cross Browser Compatible Issues.
Always check out your site by viewing it in the main browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, and Opera) and on a PC and Mac if possible. You’d be surprised how each web browser has its quirks. Sometimes a page will look really bad or completely wrong in one browser and you’ll have to spend time correcting the problem. But, you won’t know unless you test it… don’t rely on your visitors to tell you.
6. Broken Links
This one should be obvious, check you site’s navigation and all the links occasionally. There are tools available to do this for you if you have a really large site.
7. Disjointed Layout and Poor Navigation.
Make sure your site is easy to use. Have someone that’s not familiar with your site try to locate something. Ask them to place an order, or find the page for sending in support questions, etc. Watch them. Listen to what they have to say and adjust your site to make it work better.
8. Missing or Incomplete Contact Information.
Make sure the contact information on your site is kept current and complete.
9. Text in Graphics to Make “Pretty” vs. Real Text
The font styles are somewhat limited for web pages. Some people want their site to look really good with fonts like you can use in Microsoft Word or other word processor packages. So how do you do that? You make it in Adobe PhotoShop or another graphic package and save out your text, words, paragraphs, etc as images. This works really well as far as good looking text goes, however, because images are larger than text, the pages load slower. The bigger drawback is that you have the words, which tell what your site is about, locked up in images. It’s not accessible to search engines that crawl web sites and catalog them. What does that mean? It means that if you’re relying on getting traffic to your site from search engines you want real text on your site that the search engines can read, not images of text that only humans can read. If your site is not dependant on search engine traffic, then this may not matter other than the slower load time for the image laden pages.
10. Using Something Just To Be Using It.
Don’t use flash, or background sounds, or videos that automatically load and start playing, or JavaScript that opens 900 windows. Only use these things when they are necessary and serve a valid purpose, don’t use them just because you may know how and want to show off.
11. Not Updating the Site Regularly.
As you or your organization changes you should modify your site to reflect those changes. As you add new products or announce new products, etc. you should add them to your site. Your web site can be a tremendous asset in your marketing toolkit, but not if it’s stale and outdated.
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