The Ten Most Common Website Design Mistakes
by Patrick Deese - March 14, 2005
Designing a Website For Eyes instead of Search Engines: Always make sure that important phrases and terms are in text, and not presented in graphics – search engines don't have eyes.
Bloated Code: Including lots of JavaScript, or other unnecessary code in your pages, instead of including them from an external file can clutter up your content and prevent the search engines from properly interpreting your page's content.
Bad User Interface: Be sure that the navigation on your site is arranged in a logical manner – try to divide your site into groups of general categories which then can be divided into more specific categories. Avoid using icons that don't specifically represent the destination of the link.
Widescreen Content: Some novice designers tend to design large, dramatic pages that don't fit in the 800x600 screen resolution. Not everyone is using a large monitor, and some older people set their monitor resolution to 800x600 even on larger displays.
Below the Fold Content: It is normal and expected that a page's content may sometimes extend below the visible area of the browser. Anything below about 400 – 450 pixels is considered the "fold" (originally referring to how a newspaper is folded in half, only allowing the masthead and headlines to show on the newsstands). Make sure that you have at least part of your unique and important content.
Das Blinkenlights: Just because you can make something blink 50 times a second doesn't mean it is a good idea. Blinking graphics and animations are often distracting and make reading the content an annoying task.
Session IDs: Sessions IDs are great for tracking visitors, terrible for search engines. If your site is going to use session IDs, make sure that session IDs are not given to user agents that do not have JavaScript enabled – otherwise you are inadvertently feeding the search engines page after page of duplicate content – which can severely affect your rankings.
Changing URLs: Make sure that your web pages are named in a logical, manner. Avoid changing the destinations of your files – otherwise you are losing potential links from other websites, and losing the benefits of having the content in the index, as the search engines will not have the most current URL for your page.
Invalid HTML Code: Having invalid HTML code can lead to problems with the search engine's abilities to index your pages. Invalid code can also cause your pages to display incorrectly in different web browsers.
Hidden Email Addresses: One of the worst things I still see is linking email addresses like this email us, it better to link like this: email@example.com - it accomplishes the same thing, makes a clickable email address, but also allows people who don't have their default email program configured (web based email users, for instance) still see the website's contact info easily.
