5 Things to avoid when building a website

By James Middleton - Added 27th of June 2008

As a lecturing in Web Design and Development, each term I meet plenty of eager students wanting to acquire a sound knowledge in this highly popular subject. Unfortunately, 20 hours lecturing time is no where near enough the exposure needed to know all of the ins and outs of designing a decent site.

I have written this article to help guide the budding designer toward making the right decisions. The emphasis is on 'what not to do' rather than the usual 'what to do'. It covers everything from the look and feel of a site, to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So, here goes...

1. Don't be too inventive.

I know, that sounds pretty conservative, but sometimes in the struggle to create a designs that is truly original, we can easily forget about how our visitors will perceive it. If you open any book, you will find the content, foreword, etc. at the front, lots of words in the middle and maybe a notes/index at the back. This is familiar format applied for the reader. In the same way, it's good to keep things simple when designing a website: Keep the menu in a familiar place, don't bombard your visitors with alien concepts. Not so long ago, many of us were on pay-as-you-go dial up and as a result developed a sense of impatience when 'surfing the web'. If we have to 'discover' how to get to the contact page, we will most likely not bother.

2. Keep out the bells and whistles.

I know it's now an old one, but incase you haven't heard this one before. Many beginners to website design will no doubt like to see how far they can push there WYSIWYG software (What You See Is What You Get). As a results, all sorts of animated buttons, rollover effects, 'wacky' cursor effect, etc. are thrown at each page in the hope that it will impress the visitor. Well, the truth is, it most of the time will not. Flashing animations and quirky sounds may impress a few of us the first, maybe even the second time we see them...but our delight will soon run soar. Keep it simple. Don't give your visitor a headache if you intend for them to read your beautifully written content.

3. Badly written copy

Copy (that's the written content of your site) will play a very large part in the selling of whatever you are selling. If it is full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, then it will make you look silly. Now, I'm not great at writing good copy myself, but at least I will run the spell check over things and get somebody else to read my copy before showing it to my visitors. Keep it short and sweet. Use headings, ordered and unordered list, bold, italics, paragraphs etc. to break up your texts and render them down into a digestible form for your visitor. I like to form my written content in the style of a newspaper - Main heading (a few important Grab 'em words), Sub-heading (a short sentence giving a little more information) a leading short paragraph (often in bold - sort of a summary of the article) and then the rest of the copy. Works for me.

4. Flash sites

Flash (shockwave format) is a very popular, an very excellent piece of software that allow you to create amazing animations, dynamic content, applications, etc. You can also use it to create an entire website. Now this sounds very tempting - all of the limitations of HTML/PHP/ASP etc., can be washed away in a 'Flash'. Many people do use Flash to do just that, and if you are willing to sit around waiting for each page to load up (Zzzzz) then you will see some amazing things. However, even after Googles recent announcement that it's indexing process can now crawl deeper into Flash-based content, a site produce in this manner will still struggle to get all content indexed in an appropriate manner. Simple HTML sites tend to do better with the search engines.

5. Try to fool the Search Engines

Another old point, but becoming even more valid. Don't try to pack your pages with 'keywords' that aren't relevant to your content - don't use any for of 'trickery' or 'black-hat' jibbery pokery. I'm not judging you here, but be as honest as possible. If you website is about 'cakes', then talk about 'cakes' and keyword for 'cakes', because 'cakes' are lovely! Enthusiasm is completely contagious, so be enthusiatic...It can results in people returning to your site, time and time again to wander through it's delights. Who knows, this may result in the odd visitor here and there adding links back to your site from their own...all good stuff to help with page rank and search engines.

Okay, only 5 points that you may or may not have read before. There are hundreds of others that I could have come up with, but I don't want to bombard you with too much information on one page...that's kind of a point in itself.

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Credits & Links

Article written by James Middleton - www.webdesign-4-beginners.co.uk.

Information for Publishers

You are free to republish this article, provided you retain all hyperlinks as active in the above credits.

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