10. Your best content takes 7 clicks to get to.
Provide good content and make sure it's easy for people to find. Don't bury your best content where people have to click more than 3 links to find it.
9. Your site uses frames and makes no effort to address all the problems with them.
Frames are most often a very bad idea these days. They were great back in the days before server-side coding, search engine optimization, IDEs such as Dreamweaver, CSS, and all the other tools web designers have at their disposal. Now, they make pages hard to bookmark, cause problems with refreshing a page, cause problems with search engine links, and can break printing, among other things. Be very, very sure of how you plan on addressing all the problems they cause before you decide to use them, and weigh the benefits carefully. There is probably a better way to accomplish what you wanted by using another method.
8. Your content looks like either a third-grader wrote it or it was a school project for someone learning English.
Spell-check is your friend. Actually knowing how to spell and having good grammar are also your friends. Spell-check doesn't catch many common mistakes, such as the difference between 'too', 'to', and 'two'. Or the difference between 'effect' and 'affect'. Or missing apostrophes. But your more intelligent readers will. And it does matter if you're trying to convince your readers of something, whether it's buying your product or listening to your opinion.
7. Your page has neon green as a background and bright red text.
Easy on the bright neon colors, tiger. It may "look cool" to some, but be sure your target audience also finds it "cool". Loud colors often scare people off. Gear your design to your audience.
6. Your page only works right in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Test in more browsers than just Microsoft Internet Explorer. Some people actually use other browsers! A few of the choices out there are Firefox, Safari, AvantBrowser, and Konqueror. Some work on Windows. Some don't. Post in Usenet groups and ask for Unix, Linux, and Mac users to check out your page and critique it. Beware, though. You might just get what you asked for.
5. Animations. Lots of cute animations.
Nothing turns off the average web surfer more than a bunch of animations that took forever to load on dial-up.
4. Pages have "under construction" signs.
'Under Construction' signs just plain look unprofessional. If a page doesn't have content yet, say so and give an approximate timeframe for users to check back. Even better, if possible, don't even put up pages that aren't ready for public consumption, as it were.
3. Scrolling text appears on the page or in the scrollbar.
Get rid of that scrolling text. It gets attention, all right. Just not the good kind.
2. A big graphical counter sits on the bottom of the page.
Ditch the counters. Graphical counters do nothing for you and make your page look like someone from AOL got their hands on Frontpage again. If you want site statistics, check out what your host offers. Most have stats broken down by page. If they don't, use an invisible counter.
1. MIDI or other music/sound files are embedded in the page and begin to play right away. There's no way to turn off the sound.
Nothing annoys people more than sound that plays and they can't control it. They might be listening to something already (such as WinAmp) or they might be somewhere that they didn't want sound to broadcast (i.e. work, library). If you want them to hear it, provide a link to turn the sound ON, not off, or offer a sound download such as a .wav file.
-- Article copyright M. Nikole Hunn. All rights reserved.
