What not to ask
your web designer to do

There are a few fundamental no no's in the website game that can really make or break the users experience of your site. We have compiled a list of the ultimate things of what not to do when approaching the design, development and marketing. Some of these are contentious and some you may not agree with but the tried and tested science of usability will argue otherwise, sometimes even the best looking site can be an epic fail.

The infamous splash page...

This is a page that acts as an introduction, usually graphic intense with an enter button that takes you to the remainder of the site...sexy? they can be, damaging to your sites ranking and usability? Completely. Let me explain why.

The average attention span of a common internet user upon landing on a site is a few seconds..like 2 or 3 to be exact. If your going to use this precious commodity on an entrance page containing little or no information your not going anywhere fast. You have to capture a users attention, reminding them why they are there. People use the internet for information, they don't want to be wowed with flashiness..contentious I know...you need to tell them what they want to know instantly or shazam they've clicked out of you.

Google won't rank you properly. Now there is a sentence you don't want to hear.
A websites home page (the index page) is very important in how it is searched for relevant key words and content...If you have neither of these, which splash pages by definition don't your starting an a back foot miles behind the rest of the competition. To quote a fellow writer on this subject If your web designer tries to convince you that you need a splash page; buy a large fish and slap him or her with it repeatedly" Extreme maybe but I don't think so.

Flash for the use of good and not evil...

Flash is used to add animation, video and interactivity to websites. Flash is amazing, flash is damn cool but flash has been abused publicly and it's not pretty. I am not a flash hater, some of my best friends are flash animators and let me tell you they really push the boundaries of cool animation and web interactivity. It's when you get bad flash that it all goes a bit sour, and you not only want to tear your hair out but more importantly you give up on a site and go elsewhere.

A few things to think about before using flash.

It's not indexable by google. There are ways and means around this, like creating a HTML version of the site and delivering that to googles spiders for light reading. This does essentially mean your creating two layers of the same site. Load times for intense animation. This comes back to the 2-3 second attention span of internet users...your pushing it expecting that they will wait. Flash requires your user to have a flash plugin. Admittedly lots of people do, but then again there are always some people that don't have the plugin, and your site will not exist to them...just a grey unreadable box. Iphones don't use it...Yup a total killer to the flash community, if you want your site on the mobile fly flash will not work on an iphone.

So flash has it's downsides but because it is so damn sexy what the general consensus has been is to create hybrid sites. That is traditional websites (HTML based) with flash elements inside them. So anything that doesn't require animation is served in HTML code and anything that does is embedded in, beautiful.

Bad Navigation

It's not often hear me say limit your creativity, but on this one, do not reinvent the wheel. The way users interact with navigation is a learnt process and if you go outside their sphere of knowledge you loose. Put it up the top, make it obvious and keep it clean.

The worst, navigation elements that fly out to 3 or 4 levels and when you rollover they fail. Seriously infuriating. Navigation should never recourse into more than 3 levels and I'm being generous at that. I would suggest two levels at the most with Main navigation and sub navigation, if you need more than this, perhaps you need to investigate your Information Architecture (see next.)

Bad IA (Information Architecture)

What is IA you ask, it is Information Architecture, which seems to be an over the top way of explaining the flow of information on a site. IA is critical to a sites success and it truly is architecture in the sense of trying to deliver your message in a coherent way whilst navigating a user through a site. Things like breadcrumbs, which are a list of the pages you had to navigate to get to your current location, are great for helping a user know exactly where they are and where they need to go. Bad IA is when the user is taken to a part of the site that doesn't serve them. Like a contact page without any contact details (don't laugh it happens.)

Old Technology

It's the nature of the game, evolve or die. Sites that use obsolete technologies don't work anymore and the reason is that they were never that good in the first place. Here are some examples of things not to touch, and if your developer is using them, find that fish again and slap them with it.

Tables...this is so early 90's it pains me, but they are everywhere. Table layouts have no flexibility and can harm google ranking by the amount of code to text ratio that they require. How do you tell if your site is using tables...it's in the code so if you right click and view source, and you see things like this <table><td></td></table> your outdated. * There are some cases when tables are okay, like a data table but not for entire layouts. Frames...This is a weird one, it uses a frame to call in another HTML page. If this is used for an entire page that is wrong, if it used for things like google maps it's allowed.

Broken Links

Links that don't go anywhere and serve you a 404 not found page or some other meaningless error message. There truly is no better way to say unprofessional than to navigate a user to a page that doesn't exist.

www or no

Have you ever been to a site and left out the www and the site goes nowhere or you get an error page? This is because the domain name has not been directed correctly and can really throw users off scent. It's a good one to check and it does get overlooked.

So in a nutshell

I did consider creating a list of my top 10 worst websites (and it's quite lucrative list at that) but I didn't want to loose any friends. In summing up here is a small list of other little chestnuts to avoid

• Never resize a users browser window...that's right never, it's annoying
• Pop up's are budget, nobody likes them and most modern browsers will block them
• Don't ask for a high bandwidth or low bandwidth option on entering, you want as little obstacles as possible to get a user into the guts of a site
• Focus on content. Content is king, this is the current way of the web, have something valid to say and keep saying it. Get a copywriter on board.
• Your website must work in all modern browsers IE6,IE7, IE8 Firefox, Safari, it is unacceptable for some of these to be left out
• If you really must have music (don't recommend it) make sure it's easy to turn off