10 Deadly Web Site Sins

Have you ever stumbled upon a page that made you think, "Wow! This would be a really great site if only they hadn't done BLANK". Or, "If I see one more page with those BLANKITY BLANKS, I'm going to scream!".

Today we're going to fill in the blanks.

You can spend every waking moment promoting your site, but if it's not a well designed site to begin with, you're fighting a losing battle. Good sites help to promote themselves.

What should you do to develop a "good" site? Well, it's probably easier to tell you what you shouldn't do.

In this two-part article I'm going to cover what I feel are the 10 Deadly Web Site Sins. Although these are only my opinions, I believe that lots of Web surfers share my point of view. Like most things in life, it's hard for a group of people to come to an agreement on what the "ideal" is in any given area. But you can bet that we can all pretty much pinpoint what's downright annoying.

Before you start thinking, "Well, well, aren't we Miss 'Webbier-Than-Thou' ", let me share something with you: one of the reasons I can say these things are a mistake is because I've done many of them myself. Yes, I did some of these very things and I *liked* them; I liked them a lot. I have come to realize the error of my ways and I've reformed. BAD! BAD WEB DESIGNER! BAD! BAD!

But before I get too carried away with my little mea culpa, let me say that some of these things I've never done, I never will do, I wouldn't even consider doing, and I hope you won't either because they jump all over my last good nerve. Read on and see if you agree...

WEB SITE SIN #1: Slow Download Times

You can have a site that provides the best content in the world, but if it takes forever to download no one will hang around long enough to view it. As a general rule, the longer it takes your site to download, the fewer visitors will stick it out 'til the bitter end to see it. The next time you're tempted to take that 8x10 photo of you at age 5 with Bozo and turn it into a clickable image map, it might be wise pass on it.

When visitors hit your site, they're looking for information, services, or products. For the most part, they aren't interested in that cool new graphic it took you a whole day to create.

So, should you just deliver your information in a text-only, no frills format? No, of course not. Unless you want to have single digit daily site traffic.

What you should strive for is a balance between image quality and image size. There is a happy medium where the image looks good and the file is small enough that it will download fairly quickly. Your graphics should enhance the presentation of your information, not overpower it.

There are several image compression utilities online; NetMechanic offers GIFBot, a free service which will display several compressed images and allow you to choose and save the one that best suits your needs.

Be sure and use the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes of the IMG tag too!

WEB SITE SIN #2: Poor Choice of Background and Text Colors

There is nothing more frustrating than going to a site that you feel will be exactly what you're looking for, only to find that the information is unreadable due to poor background and text color choices.

I would be hard pressed to ever use anything but black text on a white background for a business site. Black on white provides the easiest readability. Save the background GIF of the psychedelic kittens giving the "peace" sign for your personal page.

If you do choose to stray from black on white, make sure that there is enough contrast between your text and background colors so that your visitors will not have trouble reading your content. You also have to take into consideration that they must be able to read the links and visited links against the background color. You can always change the link colors, but I don't particularly like to do that myself. People know what the default colors mean and if you introduce new ones, they have to figure out which color stands for what.