The 10 Biggest Mistakes

In Web Design

There are plenty of mistakes made in the world of web design. In this article, I'm going to discuss what I believe to be the 10 biggest.

1. Too Many Ads. When you're trying to make money from your website, it's all too easy to overwhelm your site with ads. Put yourself in your user's place and take a good hard look at your site and ask yourself the following questions: Are there too many ads? Do they feel intrusive? Am I getting information from the site or does it feel like just a page-holder for the ads? 

2. Plugin Overload. You've got to keep media that uses plugins to a strict maximum of 1 per page. If you've got Flash, then you can't have a media player, or if you're using Java, then you can't have Flash. It's not as bad to use the same plugin twice, however.

3. Flash Intros. Please, don't use a Flash intro on your website. You'd think everyone would realize by now that they're universally mocked and hated.

4. Unclear Layout and Navigation. Many websites, especially business sites, suffer from some kind of disease where even the very simplest task takes 10 steps to achieve. If users are emailing you to ask you how to do things on your site, then you need to improve your layout and navigation. If there are certain tasks people want to do frequently, put them on the front page.

5. No Marking for External Links. There are 2 kinds of links: internal (to other parts of your website) and external (to other websites). For the benefit of your users, though, it's best if you mark external links, either by making them a different color or using some kind of a symbol (a box with an arrow is the usual one). It's also good to make the external links open in new windows, so people aren't leaving your site altogether when they click them.

6. Unclear Linking. Some web pages are designed to show links only when people put their mouse over them. While this might make the design look nicer, it is not very user friendly. Instead, use a clearly contrasting color for links, and preferably underline them. This makes them more visible to the user, thus more user friendly.

7. Unlabelled Email Links. Always clearly mark a link that will send email (a mailto link) with the word 'email'. If you make clicking a name send email, you'll annoy users who just clicked to find out more about the person.

8. Broken Links. You've got to check all your links regularly to make sure that they all still work. There's nothing worse than finding a site that looks useful, only to find that it hasn't been updated in years and none of the links work any more. Yes, a website does mostly run itself after a while, but that doesn't mean that you should neglect essential maintenance.

9. Strange Fonts. Stick to the most common web fonts: that's pretty much just Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. If you're using more obscure fonts, then most users won't have them -- and those that do will find your text hard to read. The only time to use non-standard fonts is in your logo or headings, and then only if they are displayed as an image.

10. Badly-sized Text. It's important to keep your text around the standard size (preferably just below). Making text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many users. The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user's preferred text size. You should also consider offering buttons on your site to decrease or increase the font size.