Top 10 Mistakes of Web Building

These are the top 10 mistakes that are very common, DO NOT use them or your website will not be a very successful one.
They are ranked from the most common ones to the least.

1) Images for Text
Never ever use a splash page with huge graphics or flash animation for your website homepage. This is very bad and can reduce a huge amount of the potential traffic you can get from search engines. Instead, have a content rich homepage in text. YES, text, not graphics. It is best if you do not use those niffy graphical headers for navigation too. In short: never use excessive images as representation of text.

2) Using Iframes or Frames
The number one most common reason why some websites just don't get any traffic. Heres why... frames are highly search engine unfriendly. Search engines just don't see websites the same way as human users. They treat each frame as a separate webpage, which is bad, if you have navigation links in 1 frame, and content in the other. The webbots cannot crawl from 1 page to the other since some frames will not have any navigation links. Read more on PageRank distribution here.

3) Where is that link again?
Bad navigation can drive your visitors away when they can't find a webpage they just visited. A common practise is to have links at the top under the banner, at the left hand side, sometimes at the right hand side, and finally, at the footer. Make sure to diffentiate them, have them linked to different parts if possible. See Good Navigation Design.

4) Long scrolling pages
Overwhelming your visitors with information is not a good thing. Cut your webpage short with around 400-800 words each. Most people hate using a long webpage and scrolling around to search for the information they want.

5) URL Cloaking, URL Shortening
These url shortening techniques might help your visitor to remember your shorter url, but is another of the deadly search engine unfriendly features. Use a easy to remember url right at the start or start your website at a new url.

6) Javascript generated content
Again, search engines cannot read them. You can use Javascript for web forms, guestbooks, etc.
But do not use them to generate content. Use HTML instead, or if you want a database driven dynamic content, use PHP.

7) Open in new browsers
Unless you are linking to another website, always have links loaded in the current browser. It is annoying to work with so many browsers and is not user friendly.

8) Flashy backgrounds, bright text, pixelated images
These speak of bad design, bad taste, bad website. A simple 1 colour background is usually good, or a gradient type background, moving from 1 colour at the top to another at the bottom.
Make sure your text is easy to read. It is annoying to see text against a large colourful picture/photo as background. What works on your desktop doesn't work online. Blend your colours well, you have to know contrasting and complementing colours if you want to design a site.

If you are making pixelated images using MS Paint, save it for yourself. It puts people off seeing poor quality pictures. Get better quality free ones if you can't make them yourself.

9) Design Consistency
Alway use the same template/design throughout your website, unless you have a subsection that has to be different (like forums). Keep the link colours the same so visitors know what to click. This is common for websites that do not operate with a web template, and just throw every content inside, hoping it turns out good.

10) Animated mouse cursor, anyone?
Cramming free Javascripts into your website, doing those unnecessary effects like animated mouse cursors, scrolling status bar, swirly calenders, disabling right clicks (worse of them all) slows your site to a crawl.

Alvin Ng has been actively engaging in the webmaster community since 2000 and shares his techniques to making money online with fellow Internet users.
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