When you start designing a Website, your options are wide open. Yet all that potential can lead to problems that may cause your Web site to fall short of your goals. The following list of design mistakes addresses the needs of commercial Web sites, but it can easily be applied to personal and hobby sites and to professional nonprofit sites as well.
#1: Failing to provide information that describes your Website
Every Website should be very clear and forthcoming about its purpose. Either include a brief descriptive blurb on the homepage of your Web site or provide an About Us (or equivalent) page with a prominent and obvious link from the home page that describes your Web site and its value to the people visiting it.
#2: Skipping alt and title attributes
Always make use of the alt and title attributes for every XHTML tag on your Web site that supports them. This information is of critical importance for accessibility when the Web site is visited using browsers that don't support images and when more information than the main content might otherwise be needed.
#3: Changing URLs for archived pages
All too often, Websites change URLs of pages when they are outdated and move off the main page into archives. This can make it extremely difficult to build up significantly good search engine placement, as links to pages of your Web site become broken. When you first create your site, do so in a manner that allows you to move content into archives without having to change the URL. Popularity on the Web is built on word of mouth, and you won't be getting any of that publicity if your page URLs change every few days.
#4: Not dating your content
In general, you must update content if you want return visitors. People come back only if there's something new to see. This content needs to be dated so that your Web site's visitors know what is new and in what order it appeared. Even in the rare case that Web site content does not change regularly, it will almost certainly change from time to time -- if only because a page needs to be edited now and then to reflect new information.
#5: Creating busy, crowded pages
Including too much information in one location can drive visitors away. The common-sense tendency is to be as informative as possible, but you should avoid providing too much of a good thing. When excessive information is provided, readers get tired of reading it after a while and start skimming. When that gets old, they stop reading altogether.
#6: Going overboard with images
With the exception of banners and other necessary branding, decorative images should be used as little as possible. Use images to illustrate content when it is helpful to the reader, and use images when they themselves are the content you want to provide. Do not strew images over the Website just to pretty it up or you'll find yourself driving away visitors. Populate your Web site with useful images, not decorative ones, and even those should not be too numerous. Images load slowly, get in the way of the text your readers seek and are not visible in some browsers or with screen readers. Text, on the other hand, is universal.
#7: Implementing link indirection, interception, or redirection
Never prevent other Websites from linking directly to your content. There are far too many major content providers who violate this rule, such as news Websites that redirect links to specific articles so that visitors always end up at the home page. This sort of heavy-handed treatment of incoming visitors, forcing them to the home page of the Web site as if they can force visitors to be interested in the rest of the content on the site, just drives people away in frustration. When they have difficulty finding an article, your visitors may give up and go elsewhere for information. Perhaps worse, incoming links improve your search engine placement dramatically -- and by making incoming links fail to work properly, you discourage others from linking to your site. Never discourage other Websites from linking to yours.
#8: Making new content difficult to recognize or find
In #4, we mentioned keeping content fresh and dating it accordingly. Here's another consideration: Any Website whose content changes regularly should make the changes easily available to visitors. New content today should not end up in the same archive as material from three years ago tomorrow, especially with no way to tell the difference.
#9: Displaying thumbnails that are too small to be helpful
When providing image galleries with large numbers of images, linking to them from lists of thumbnails is a common tactic. Thumbnail images are intended to give the viewer an idea of what the main image looks like, so it's important to avoid making them too small.
#10: Forgoing Web page titles
Many Web designers don't set the title of their Web pages. This is obviously a mistake, if only because search engines identify your Website by page titles in the results they display and saving a Web page in your browser's bookmarks uses the page title for the bookmark name by default.
Achieving success
These considerations for Web design are important, but they're often overlooked or mishandled. A couple of minor failures can be overcome by successes in other areas, but it never pays to shoot yourself in the foot just because you have another foot to use. Enhance your Web site's chances of success by keeping these design principles in mind.
-Krista Nelson
http://www.techrepublic.com/
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