|
Or... Ways to Avoid Having a Lame, Annoying, or Clueless Website
Please do not copy, take, "borrow", steal,
or otherwise use this material without permission. This is all original,
and it's all protected
by international copyright law. Feel free to link to this page,
rewrite the information in your own words all you want
(hey, nothing on this page is a secret!), and use the information for
whatever purpose you wish, but don't just take the content, okay?
Certain things will immediately mark your design as less-than professional.
Here are a few of them.
Embedded Music
At least one half of all web surfers say they hate embedded music
in a web page. They hate it even more if there is no way to turn it
off. How many times have you innocently opened a page to have it blare
some badly sequenced version of some song you don't even like, with
no way to turn it off other than to mute your sound card or leave the
page? This is the web equivalent of having neighbors who blast music
that you don't like into your windows!
Don't do this to your visitors. If you want to provide music, make
it voluntary, so they can click the link to listen if they
want to. Don't force them to listen. If you absolutely feel you
must include embedded music, use a control to let them turn it off
and put it near the top of the page.
[menu]
Linking to Images (or other files) on
Another Server
Directly linking to images (or other files) on another server for
use on your website is known as bandwidth theft, and it's a violation
of the Terms of Service of many ISPs. It's also extremely bad netiquette.
Do note that if someone specifically invites you to link to an image
on their site (such as for a quiz result or graphic for a webring),
you're not actually stealing bandwidth, but you still might want to
put the graphic on your own server for reasons outlined below.
What happens when you link to images (or other files like sound files
or similar) on someone else's server is that every time someone loads
your page, it draws the image or file from their site.
Since many people pay for their bandwidth usage, every time someone
loads your page it costs the person you're stealing from money.
On some large sites with many graphics, this can add up to literally
hundreds or even thousands of dollars in extra fees per month, and many
a free graphics site has been shut down due to so many people
linking and stealing bandwith in this way.
And not only is this bad for the person you're stealing from, it can
be bad for you, too, in lots of ways.
Since you are loading images to your page over a network, your page's
load time will almost certainly be much slower. If there's a network
problem between you and the other server (which is common on the internet),
your page may take a very, very long time to load and eventually show
a broken image when it can't connect.
When you link to images that belong to someone else, you give them
the power to put any image they want on your page.
It is not uncommon when someone discovers a bandwidth thief to replace
the stolen images with something rude. You could end up with images
that publicly call you a thief. You could end up with much worse, such
as obscene images. When you link to images on someone else's server,
you're practically begging them to supply you with something else and
make you look like a fool.
Of course, not all webmasters are inclined to put something rude on
your page, and will simply move or rename the images, so your site is
just a bunch of broken images. (It has happened, too, that a site owner
does this and the bandwidth thief emails the site owner and complains
that they messed up the thief's site! Can you believe the nerve and
stupidity of some people?)
Do not ever, ever link to an image on someone else's website
unless it expressly and directly allowed and there's a good
reason to do so (such as a merchant "reward" plan or the like). Stealing
bandwidth will slow your site down considerably, you risk having broken
images if the network is down or their server is down, and you may end
up with quite other than you bargained for!
WebTV users should visit this
page about using WebTV and how to use transloaders so as to avoid
stealing bandwidth. Yes, it's wrong no matter who does it.
For tips on how you can prevent people from stealing bandwidth from
you (i.e., prevent direct-linking), see the
Technical Tips page
[menu]
Centered Text
Many people feel it will emphasize the text, and when used only for
a headline, it certainly will. Don't use it for all of your text, though.
Ever see a newspaper or a magazine which centered the body of the text?
No? There's a good reason for it: English and just about all European
languages are read from left to right. Centered text is very hard to
read and follow, because it's not how people normally read text.
For special effects, links, headlines, and so forth, centered (or
even right-justified) text works well. Don't do it for the main body
of your text unless you want to make sure it's difficult to follow and
make sure people think you're a little clueless about typography.
[menu]
Default Font Face
Default font for most machines is "Times New Roman" (or a variation
of "Times"). This is a lovely, classic serif font, and it's very readable...
in print. On a monitor, however, it's considerably more difficult
to read. The serifs (the little pointy bits on the edges of the font)
are hard to render well in pixels, the font is narrow, and it's just
a very poor choice for a screen font.
Set the font face in your pages to something more readable. A sans-serif
font (i.e., a font without the little pointy bits, the serifs) is much
more readable and easy on the eyes. Most Macs have Helvetica, and most
PCs have Arial (which is pretty much a clone/knock-off of Helvetica),
and you can also set the font face to "sans-serif" and let the machine
decide which sans-serif font to use.
One serif font which is widely available is Georgia, made by Microsoft.
This font is very rounded and quite readable as a screen font. Microsoft
used to offer it as a free download, but they have discontinued the
distribution of it. All newer versions of Windows comes with Georgia,
but Mac, Linux, and other users may or may not have it.
In all cases, you should be specifying second and third choises for
fonts, anyway, so that if the user doesn't have Georgia or Verdana,
for example, they can still view your page reasonably well with Arial
or Helvetica, or their own default sans-serif font.
[menu]
Random Capitalization, ALL Caps, and oThEr kEwL
tYpInG
Some people have an odd habit of Capitalizing The First Letter Of
Every Word Like This, either because they don't know any better or because
they feel it will give some sort of emphasis. In fact, it mostly just
makes it hard to read (and can be confusing, since this sort of capitalization
is normally used only for titles). Some people also just Randomly captialize
Certain words in what Looks Very like a completely arbitrary Way (just
Like This sentence). SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME
FOR NO APPARENT REASON, WHICH NOT ONLY MAKES THE TEXT MUCH HARDER TO
READ, IT GIVES THE IMPRESSION OF SHOUTING. And then there are also a
small group of people who think it's amusing or cool to tYpE LiKe tHiS
or say things like "welcome 2 my page, glad u r here".
Just don't. Unless you want viewers to think you've got no grasp of
basic English or, in the case of All Caps, that you don't know how to
turn off your Caps Lock key. (And if your page is n a language other
than English, you should still avoid kEwL tYpInG and so on, because
it's hard to read and looks clueless in any language!)
[menu]
Screen Resolutions, Monitor Sizes, Etc.
You should be at least aware that many people don't have the same
screen resolution, color depth, or monitor size that you do. Things
may look very different to them than to you, and of course, while you
can't possibly predict or anticipate everyone's settings (and you don't
have to), you should at least take these things into consideration.
Here are some very rough statistics, as of the date of this writing
(October 2001):
About half of people using the web have their screen resolution set
to 800x600. A further 25% or so have theirs set to 1024x768. Only about
5% use 640x480 screen resolution, but many of those who do are vision
impaired (which is why they use such a large resolution). Try changing
your own settings and looking at your web pages with them. It can be
an eye opening experience when you see your bordered background image
repeating in a way that makes the text unreadable or to see your carefully
placed tabled graphic smoosh all out of proportion, just to give two
examples.
A little over half of people on the web have their color depth set
to 16bit (also known as "High Color"). If you're using 32bit color depth
(also known as "True Color"), have a look at your site with a lower
color resolution. You may be surprised that things don't match the way
you thought they did or that they don't look nearly as smooth or seamless.
The point of all this is that while it's fine to design for the majority,
you should be at least aware of the minority. A little extra care can
go a long way. The biggest thing here, though, is when someone with
a higher screen resolution looks at your page and gets a carelessly
repeating background image and unreadable text, they have no choice
but to think you have no idea what you're doing.
[menu]
Excessive Animations or Special Effects
Animated graphics, Flash, JavaScript, Java, and so forth all have
their place in web design. Unfortunately, all of these things are frequently
abused by novices who seem to think that if one is good, many is better.
Use special effects sparingly and only with careful forethought. They
should enhance the content, not overwhelm the visitor or drag down the
loading time. When in doubt, do without, and while "because it's
there" is a fine reason to climb a mountain, it's a very poor reason
to add a special effect to a website.
[menu]
Reliance on the "Back" Button for Navigation
This is a very common mistake made by newbies in web design. Since
the visitor has a "back" button to navigate, the designer assumes they
will want to use it to get around the website.
It's very tedious to have a central page of internal links that the
visitor must continually revisit in order to find their way around the
site (this is made even worse if that central page plays music every
time it loads!). Links to all the major areas of the website should
be available on all the pages, or at least on the main pages of the
major sections. Visitors who want to remain on your site should be able
to wander around it easily, without having to backtrack continually.
If they backtrack enough, they'll backtrack right off your site.
[menu]
Orphan Pages
Search engines catalog pages based on content. Many times, someone
will find a page on a site from a search engine and find that they can't
get to the rest of the website because the page is an "orphan", meaning,
it has no links back to the "parent" site. This is particularly a problem
with sites made with frames. (Note: frames are best avoided until you've
got considerable design experience; they are extremely hard to do well
and it's very, very easy to misuse them and make a site that "breaks"
easily or which won't work outside the frames or which is inaccessible
or unusable.)
The solution to this is simple. Include links on every single page
that go back to the "home" page. Preferably, a site should use good
navigation techniques (see above) so that all the pages are portals
to the overall site. Never assume that a visitor got to your website
through the "front door". Unless your site is very deliberately organized
with specially protected directories and so on, people may get to any
page through many, many means, including search engines and links from
other sites. Make sure they can easily get to the rest of your site
if they want to.
[menu]
Dead End Sites
Poorly constructed websites are often dead end sites, which have no
way to easily get "out" or any links to any other sites. Yes, you do
want people to hang around your site and visit a while, but you do that
by providing interesting, up to date content, not by trapping them so
they have to hit the "back" button to get out (see above regarding forcing
visitors to backtrack) or actually pausing to type in a URL.
The easy way to fix this is to simply provide a few links to other
sites. Make them to topics that interest you, to sites you visit often,
to a search engine or portal site, anything to allow the visitor to
surf out as easily as they surfed in. And if you're worried that providing
links "out" will chase people off, just think about the big portal and
index sites out there. All they provide are links to other sites, and
they get loads of traffic!
[menu]
Missing ALT Tags on Images
It's not well known to novices, but not everyone has graphics capability.
Many people have slow connections and so turn the graphics off, or they
are using a browser such as Lynx
which doesn't show images at all. This is particularly true of browsers
designed for the visually impaired, which actually read pages aloud.
If your images have no "alt" tags, the person without graphics capability
will see (or hear read out) a string of text that looks like this:
[image] [image] [image] [image] [image]
If those images are links, it's worse, because they see this:
[link] [link] [link] [link] [link]
and have no idea where the links go. Using a simple ALT tag will make
the images readable by everyone, even if they have no graphics capability,
and if an image is purely for decoration and is not important to the
content or navigation of the site, you can use an "empty" ALT tag (such
as: alt="" and contained inside the image tag) which won't
be seen at all. By the way, you really shouldn't use the image's file
name ("image.gif" "picture.jpg", etc.) for the contents of an "ALT"
tag. Who cares what the file name is, and how is that going to enhance
anyone's ability to understand the contents or navigation of the website?
Furthermore, search engines actually read the ALT tags and use that
as part of how they rank your site. Leave out the information and your
site may well get a far lower ranking than it would have if the search
engine could have figured out what all those images were meant to be
and included that information in the content.
[menu]
Numerical "Hit" Counter
People use these thinking it will give them an idea how much traffic
their website is getting. In a way, it does, but the information you
get (and which you're sharing with your visitors) is almost entirely
useless. You don't know how many of the "hits" were by repeat visits,
where they went once they were there, how they got there, or anything
else of any real statistical value. If you get a lot of traffic, it
looks like you're boasting, and if you get little traffic, it just looks
lame.
If you have your own domain, you should have access to the logs, which
will give you all the information you need and more. If you're hosted
or on a server which doesn't have log access or you don't want to be
troubled with the sometimes confusing and bulky raw log files, you can
make use of one of many of free or inexpensive traffic monitor programs
which are small and unobtrusive and still provide you, the site owner,
with a lot of good information about traffic and so forth. If you really
feel you must share your traffic and other statistics with visitors,
many of these services will allow you to provide a link to the information.
[menu]
Click Here for Some Reason
One thing you see a lot of on the web is the tendency to put things
in pages such as: "click here for some reason".
This is not a particularly intuitive way to handle links. It's far
better to use the actual words you want to link, rather than making
a visitor read a whole sentence and then tacking on a link made of a
single, mostly meaningless word. If you have several choices, it's even
worse. Example:
click here to see something
click here to see something else
click here to see something else again
click here to see something weird
It would be much more effective to put the link on the things being
seen, like this:
see something
see something else
see something else again
see something weird
That way, people don't have to read a whole paragraph to find the specific
sentence that has has the "here" they're looking for.
[menu]
Clichés and Stereotypes
Some people think that if something is repeated a lot, it must be good,
or it must be the "right" thing to do. That's not necessarily
the case in life, and it's not the case in web design. Popular consensus
is not always correct.
Some things you see on the web are horribly overdone to the point of
actually turning people off. Some special effects, for example, have
been seen a million times, and by using them yourself, you're just boring
your visitors and showing how unoriginal you are, especially if you've
used it "because you can" and not because it enhances the
website.
There are also phrases on the web which are seen far too often, and
which you should avoid. A few of them are:
- Click here for [whatever] (see above)
- Welcome to my [whatever] page! (people know they're welcome already)
- Any page/feature which you put on your site only because "all
sites have one" (examples might be guestbooks or forums)
- Animated graphics for email links (examples might be spinning "@"
symbols, flying mailboxes, etc.)
- Java "lake" applet and similar Java effects, unless you
have very, very, very good reasons combined with specific design
purposes and you don't use it gratuitiously
- Pretty much any effect that is used gratituiously (page wipes, animations,
splash pages which offer no information other than
"enter here", pop-ups, etc.).
These are just a few of the most obvious stereotypes and clichés
that proliferate on the world wide web. A good rule of thumb is "when
in doubt, leave it out" and if you've heard it a hundred times,
perhaps you don't need to make it a hundred and one.
[menu]
Pointless Splash Pages
Before you get all outraged, nobody's saying that splash pages are never appropriate or that all splash pages are bad.
However, there's a certain kind of splash page that is, basically,
useless. It's just one more page for visitors to have to click past
to get to what they want: your content. There's nothing on it other
than an image or a Flash movie or something similar, and the words "enter
here" or "click to enter" or "enter". That is what's
meant (in this article) as a "useless" splash page.
There are lots of reasons not to use a splash page. The first, and
probably most important, is that an empty (or mostly empty) page won't
get indexed very well by search engines. Search engines use a combination
of methods to determine how high your page should be ranked, and one
of the things the service looks at is what's actually on the
page. If there's nothing but a title on the page, or an image
(especially one without an ALT tag, because the indexing services do
read the ALT tags!), how is the index suppsed to know what the site
is about?
You can (and should) put in META tags, but if you have too many META
tags and not enough content to balance it out (they do check that sort
of thing), your site might be discarded as contentless, or some sub-pages
will be indexed but not the main page, and other things you probably
don't want to have happen.
How many pages do you suppose are indexed as being about "Enter Here"
or about "This page best viewed in" or the like? See what I'm gettng
at?
So am I saying "never use a splash page"? Absolutely not. Splash pages
are fine if they have some content (even just a little blurb about the
site content, such as you might see on the back of a book, preferably
with several solid keywords to describe the site), labelled links to
the major areas of your site, appropriate ALT tags for any/all images
(which you should be using anyway), and with a reasonably quick load
time.
Don't make your visitors wait while your splash page loads. Welcome them inside and invite them to explore your website. If you want to use a splash page, make one that lets visitors go directly to the content. After all, isn't the content the real purpose of a website?
[menu]
Teeny-Weeny, Low-Contrast Font Face
I know it's all kewl and trendy in some circles, but it's bad design. Web content is put online to be read, isn't it? Why then, should you put all of it in a teeny size and in low-contrast? Blue on blue, blue on gray, pink on pink, that's all very soft and fluffy, but it can be downright unreadable.
If you must have a monochromatic color scheme (and there's nothing wrong with that particular color scheme), please at least use enough contrast that the text is easily readable.
And in all cases, don't set the font face so small that someone with a high resolution or small monitor or older-than-teenaged eyesight won't be able to read it, unless of course you're positive that all your visitors (and clients) have big monitors with low resolution and excellent vision.
[menu]
This page is by no means a comprehensive list, but is merely a small
collection of some of the most common errors made by newbies, mistakes
which immediately make their page look unprofessional at best and downright
dorky at worst. Do you want to learn more? It's all out there. You don't
even have to invest money most of the time, as there are many excellent
free resources on the net to help you perfect your design skills, and
many free organizations to which you can apply for interaction with
other web designers (a great way to learn!). Visit the Resources
page here at Alicorna.
|
