Common Website Mistakes

5 common mistakes which many websites are guilty of:

Over-use of Flash.  Macromedia Flash is a design tool used to create animated graphics for use on webpages.  Some stunning effects can be achieved this way BUT they slow down the speed at which your pages load AND they will seriously hamper your website’s ability to get picked up by the major search engines.  Our advice is to keep it simple and avoid using Flash animations.  Note, if your pages take ages to load up the chances are your site visitors will click away.

Distorted images.  Always resize your images first (using a graphics editing programme) before uploading them to you site.  You CAN upload a large image to your site, and set the image size in your HTML code – this will resize the image to the desired size on the page.  But it means that, whenever someone visits that page they will need to wait for the large image to upload then be resized – this can seriously slow down page loading time and it can also result in a distorted image.  Far better to edit / crop your picture to the correct size first, THEN add it to your webpage.

Unpleasant colour schemes.  The use of colour on your webpages can greatly enhance their impact, but as a simple rule stick to a dark colour text (preferably black) on a white background.  There’s nothing worse than a webpage with a brightly coloured background and light text which is a strain to read.  Similarly, avoid text that is too small:  if your visitors find it difficult to read, they are more likely to click away.

Nothing to help search engines find the site.  One of the most common web design mistakes arises from simple ignorance about how the internet search engines work.  With so much competition, it’s important to ensure your site has a strong chance of getting picked up whenever a prospective customer searches for your product or service online.  So many times we’ve seen sites – some of them with excellent design elements – let down by the fact that they cannot be found by a search engine.
 
Too much written content.  When writing about your business, it’s tempting to go into minute detail about absolutely everything you do.  But just remember that anyone looking for information online usually wants to find it quickly, so be firm with yourself and aim to keep your page content concise to create maximum impact (you can always offer a link to another page where they can read more detail if they wish).  Confronted with a huge page of text, many site visitors will simply click away so aim to keep it short.