by Katherine Wells

Created on: March 10, 2007   Last Updated: May 12, 2007

Fashions come and go in web design just as they do in all areas of life, there are however some common web design mistake that will never come into fashion.

Common Mistakes

1. Poor Navigation - An easy to use, clearly defined navigational structure is essential to any website. Important information should never be more than 2 clicks away and the navigation bar should always indicate to the user where they are within the site.

2. Poor choice of colours - The background and text colours need to contrast to enable the site to be easily readable, your background should not compete with the content of the page. If you must use a background picture select muted tones. It is generally best to use light colours for the background and dark colours for the text.

3. Flashing or scrolling text is unattractive, irritating, and very likely to make your visitors press the back-button super quick.

4. Constantly running animations - on a similar note to point 3, these can be highly distracting. As a rule of thumb, there should be no more than one animated object in view at a time, and they should be used VERY sparingly on your site.

5. Excessive advertisements - aggressive pop ups, banners, and intrusive flash ads (particularly those that follow you down the page) are highly annoying and detrimental to usability.

6. Background music - Your visitor was just listening to their favourite band when they came across your site, suddenly their music stops and yours cuts in, they hate your musical taste and even worse can't find a way to turn it off. Silence is golden, omit the music unless your site is for a band or musician and even then give your users the choice to turn it off if they want to.

7. Intro pages (at worst with no 'skip intro' button) - Don't bother get straight to the point.

8. Misspelled words, poor punctuation, techno-babble, great blocks of text - text should be clear, concise, and scannable. Use short paragraphs, bulleted/numbered lists, headings, and sub-headings etc. to guide your reader.

10. Links that don't change when visited, are not highlighted against normal text, or are not clearly defined - help your visitors out by using consistent colours and formatting to define links. Also ensure that links change colour when they have been visited to aid your user to navigate to new areas of the site and avoid clicking through to pages they have already seen.

11. Poor cross-browser compatibility - Internet Explorer may be the most widely used browser, but it is not the only one. Browsers such as Firefox and Opera may display your page very differently from IE check your page in as many browsers as possible.

12. Excessive download times - use images and media sparingly, create sleek, fast-loading pages by implementing CSS.

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