The Top 10 Web Design Mistakes

In the world of web design, there are plenty of mistakes it's possible to make.  Let's take a look at the top 10 biggest.  Why not check your site for these mistakes right now, and fix them if they're there – or run the risk of possibly annoying your visitors and driving them away from your site.

1. Too Many Ads

When you're trying to make money from your website, it's all too easy to try to fit in more ads than you really should, or start using ad formats that are intrusive.  If you've put a new ad on your site, go to the site as if you were a visitor, and ask yourself honestly: is this just too much?

2. Plugin Overload

You've got to keep media that uses plugins to a strict maximum of one per page.  That means that if you've got Flash on your page, then you don't have a media player, or if you're using Java then you can't have Flash. It's not as bad to use the same plugin twice, however.

3. Flash Intros

Please, don't use a Flash intro on your website.  This is where you arrive at a site and it has some sort of graphic introduction and you have to click again to enter the site!  You'd think everyone would realise they're a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don't seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don't be one of those people.

4. Unclear Layout and Navigation

Many websites, especially business sites, seem to suffer from some kind of disease where even the very simplest task takes ten steps to achieve.  If people are emailing you to ask you how to do things on your site, then you need to improve your layout and navigation.  Remember: if there are certain tasks people seem to want to do more often, put them on the front page.

5. No Marking for External Links

There are two kinds of links: internal (to other parts of your website) and external (to other websites).  For the benefit of your visitors, though, it's best if you mark external links, either by making them a different colour or using some kind of a symbol (a box with an arrow is the usual one).  It's also good to make the external links open in new windows, so people aren't leaving your site altogether when they click them.

6. Unclear Linking

You might think it looks better to only show links when people put their mouse over them, or not make their colour stand out too much from the rest of the text, but it's not!  While it might make the design look nicer, it makes it far less usable for your visitor. Use a clearly contrasting colour for links, and preferably underline them.  In fact… never use any other than the blue colour and underline that's most often used for links.  People instantly know what this is for.  If you colour it to match your site… your incidence of it being clicked will be low, low.

7. Unlabelled Email Links

It's a very bad idea to ever use a link that will send email (a mailto link) without clearly marking it with the word 'email'.  If you just make clicking people's names send email, you'll annoy visitors who just clicked wanting to find out more about the person.

8. Broken Links

You've got to check all your links regularly to make sure that they all still work. There's nothing worse than finding a site that looks useful, only to find that it hasn't been updated in years and none of the links work any more.  Yes, a website does mostly run itself after a while, but that doesn't mean that you should neglect the essential maintenance it needs from time to time. 

9. Strange Fonts

Stick to the most common web fonts.  That's pretty much Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana for body text.  And the most-used font for headings is Impact.  If you're using more obscure fonts, then most visitors probably won't have them – and the ones that do could find your text hard to read. The only time you should use non-standard fonts is in your logo or in headings, if they are displayed as an image.

10. Badly-sized Text

It's important to keep your text around the standard size.   Most webmasters use 12 pt for body copy and 24 pt or 36 pt for major headlines.  Making text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many visitors. The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user's preferred text size. You might also consider offering buttons on your site to decrease or increase the size.

All About Design: Principles And Elements

A shocking number of web designers are unfamiliar with the basic principles and elements of design.  Having never been through any formal design education, many just go with what they think 'looks good', with very mixed results.  If you're going to design a website, you'll do much better if you have some idea of what you're doing when it comes to graphic design.  So… here's a quick crash course in the principles and elements most useful to web designers.

Balance
It is important for things to be balanced. That doesn't necessarily mean symmetry, making one side exactly the same as the other, but it does mean that you can't make one side 'strong' and not balance that on the other side.  For example, if you use a dark colour, you should balance it with a larger area of a lighter colour. What balance allows you to do is to lead the viewer's eye to certain parts of the page without making the page look ridiculous.

Emphasis
If you want to make part of the page stand out from all the rest, you can give it emphasis using a variety of techniques.  Grouping everything together and then moving one thing a significant distance away from them will make it a focal point, as will making it a different shape from the others, or a different colour.

Line
The directions of your lines will give a mood to your design: as a rule, horizontal lines are calmer, vertical lines are moderately active, and jagged or diagonal lines are very active.  If you were designing an austere financial news site, then, you'd use horizontal lines, while a fun site for kids would be full of lines going in all sorts of directions.

Shape
One thing that most people don't realise is that there are two kinds of shapes – positive and negative – and every design has both kinds of shapes.  The positive ones are the ones you, the designer, actively placed on the page, while the negative shapes are the spaces created around the positive ones.  Many web designers simply ignore this, leaving their negative shapes as a mess – this leads to the 'boxy' look that many amateur pages have.

Colour
Colour is a huge subject.  As soon as you add more than one colour to a page, you make the other colours look different.  Some colours are complementary, and some just look terrible together.  On the web, though, you should usually avoid using too many colours on one page – even if they are complimentary, it will look garish.

For the web, hue is more important: the best way to create a colour scheme is to use black, white, and various shades of one colour.  You have to consider the brightness and intensity of your colours, to make sure you're not overdoing things.  One of the easiest mistakes to make is to use the built-in CSS colour words (background-color: red, for example) instead of creating colour codes – the colour words should generally be avoided, because they're just too intense.

Space
You can create all sorts of illusions with the amount of space you put between your objects, and where you put it.  Design is often as much knowing where to put something as it is knowing what to put there. If you make things overlap, for example, the covered things appear to be at the 'back' while the uncovered ones are at the 'front'.

Lots More!
This is the briefest of brief overviews, because graphic design is a surprisingly large subject, and one that's changing all the time.  If you want to get properly up to speed, it's worth buying a book, or even taking an evening course at your local college – you won't regret it.  A couple of resources that could help…

pdfDomination – niche marketing on steroids!  Video training and graphic package for beginners.

GrahicsGeneratorPro – create professional graphics without Photoshop skills.

Click&DragGraphics – templates, click & drag graphics, action scripts (make your own product boxes or book covers), video tutorials… and more.

Registering Your Domain Name

Before you can put your website online, you'll need to come up with a domain name.  The domain name is the name of your site on the web – the 'www.yourname.com' that people will type into their browsers and see at the top of every page of your website.  Obviously, it's important to choose a good one.

Not Just Dot Com
Many people don't realise, but the web has a lot more to offer than just .com addresses.  .com is primarily intended for businesses and companies (the 'com' is short for 'commercial').  Alternatives include .org (organisations) and .net (intended for Internet service providers).  There are also kinds of domains that you can't get for yourself, including .edu (educational institutions) and .gov (government departments).

In most cases, you should be looking at .com if you're a company selling physical products or an online business selling digital products, .org if you're non-profit, and .net if you're web-only.  If you can come up with, and achieve a good .com, it's absolutely worth having for the prestige and recognition factor.

There are some addresses that have been made available more recently, such as .name (for individuals) and .biz (for companies).  Be aware that if you've done a good job and someone remembers your business name, but not necessarily your domain name, the first thing they will type into their browser will be your name followed by .com  If you settled for a .biz, .name, .org, etc., they won't reach you. 

You should also look out for fake domains like .shop and .free, which are sold at some places but won't be accessible by most of the Internet.  In our innocence when we were first investigating the internet for business purposes, we were delighted to find a .club and registered book.club.  Really thought we were on a winner there!  It was more than a year later that we tried to get up and running with it, only to find that it wasn't recognized by any of the major search engines.  Useless!

Each country also gets its own code, and is free to divide it further how it sees fit. The United Kingdom, for example, owns .uk, and has divided it into .co.uk (companies), .org.uk (non-profit), and .me.uk (individuals), as well as a few non-public areas like .ac.uk (academic) and .gov.uk (government). If you want people to know where in the world you are, or you can't get the .com name you want, a country address is a passable alternative if you're intent on attracting a local audience to your site.  But not if you're looking at a worldwide audience.

Choosing a Name
Domain names aren't at all expensive any more, but countless millions of them are already taken.  So, it can be very difficult to come up with one for your website.  Here are some tips:

First of all, give up on any single word that can be found in a dictionary.  There are people monitoring these domains constantly and buying them the moment they become available.  It's also not really worth trying anything under four letters long, especially under .com, because it's very unlikely you'll find one.

The best thing to do is to come up with a series of two or three words that describe your website.  You'll need to seriously think around this. If you're registering a business website, you might want to include something in the domain to distinguish it from other businesses with the same name – the town where you're based, for example, but only do this if it's a local response you're hoping for.

If you want to get ranked high in search engines, it's worth considering what your potential customers would be searching for, when you're registering your domain name.

If you're trying to register your own name, then you might just be plain out of luck. Look at every kind of address you can think of.  One common trick is to register a domain in a country where you don't actually live, and use the last two letters as part of the domain – Robert Smith, for example, might register robertsmi.th, even though .th belongs to Thailand.  Obviously though, the only people likely to find you on the web, are those you've given this name to.

Finding a Registrar
Once you've made a list of domains you're happy with, the next step is finding a domain name registrar.  We use ShopSmartDomains.  Click on the link and look for the yellow box "Start A Domain Search" and enter your chosen words.  Don't be surprised if the name has already been taken.  Do a slight change (or major one) and search again.  It can take a while to find a good one that's not already been reserved.  Whatever you do, make sure you've one good keyword for your niche, in your domain name.

When you type your chosen domains into that search box, they will tell you whether or not each domain is available, and how much it will cost.  Prepared to be surprised by some of the truly obscure names that are already taken.  But don't give up.

Right now at ShopSmartDomains you'll pick up heaps of extras with your new domain name.  A personalized email account, a starter web page, quick blogcast, domain forwarding, 100-pack email forwarding, auto renew protection for your new domain name, total DNS control, status alerts and domain locking.  That's more than $33 in value!

Finally, when you're registering your domain, make sure to put in genuine contact details, as it can be taken away from you if you don't.  You should also remember the username and password you use, as you will need them before you can point that domain name to your website.

Photoshop: A Graphic Designers Dream

When it comes to web design – in fact, any kind of computerised graphic design – Photoshop has been the standard for years, and remains the market leader. But just what is so great about it?

Photoshop's Features
Photoshop was originally designed for print graphic designers, and it shows!  The selection of features available is truly professional, not 'dumbed down' like many web programs are. That doesn't mean, though, that Photoshop is not good for the web.  It supports all the important web formats, and even comes with a special tool, ImageReady, to help you prepare images for the web.  It will even help you cut up your designs into parts that can be used on a website, and write some HTML for you, if you want.

Photoshop is useful enough for the web that most people you might do designs for, will ask for the PSD (Photoshop format) files you produced – this is especially common when you design a logo.  If you're getting something designed for you, make sure you get the PSDs, as this lets another designer edit the files later. PSD files are widely supported by other software, including Paint Shop Pro.

As well as the web and print, Photoshop is also used in television, film and DVD preparation – but that doesn't mean it's become unfocused.  It simply provides almost every feature you could ever want, and is constantly doing things that people didn't think were possible.  In the latest version, for example, there is a function to easily remove shadows without altering the rest of the image, and a function that lets you extend objects in images without sacrificing the image's perspective.

Each new version makes the existing features easier to use, which is significant given how revolutionary some of Photoshop's functions were considered just a few years ago.  You can do things that were once thought impossible with nothing more than a few clicks.

You'll be amazed at how easily it allows you to produce logos and other website elements. Photoshop's layers tool is still better than any other out there, and lets you layer text and images together quickly to create a very professional look.

Photoshopping
Photoshop can make such impressive changes to images that a term for it has come about on the web… 'Photoshopping'.  Photoshopping is when you take an image and modify it using Photoshop so that it becomes a convincing, but fake, new image.  The technique has gained fame from several incidents of fake images being spread across the web and even in the established media.  Photoshop can produce output so real that even experts have trouble spotting it.  Fashion photographers would be lost without it.

Photoshop's Only Drawback
There's not much argument that Photoshop is expensive.  At the time of writing this tutorial, there are two versions of Photoshop CS5 available.  The first CS5 is for Photographers and Print Designers and this is US$699 with an upgrade from $199.  The extended version for video professionals, cross-media designers, web designers and interactive designers now runs at US$999 with an upgrade from $349.

Having said that, it's also fair to say that anyone with any experience of Photoshop, won't consider using anything else.  It is the best available.  And if you're starting to build an online empire… why pay graphic designers up to $1000 for your next website.  Grab Photoshop and start producing your own.  Their tutorial system is also without equal.

Building A Budget Website

Once upon a time, building a website was very expensive.  Now, though, you can have a site up and running for the price of a used book, if you're frugal, careful and know where to get the best advice!  Getting the cheapest website you can is a great first step to getting started on the web.

Five Dollar Domains
If you're willing to take the less popular domains like .info, or some of the ones for specific countries, then you should easily be able to get your hands on a domain for less than $5.  Some countries, such as .tk (the small island of Tokelau), even offer their domains for nothing!  But seriously guys and girls… you owe it to yourself to grab the right dotcom domain name for your new business.  A word to the wise… don't get started online until you've decided on the niche you're going to operate in.  NicheDynamite has all the gen to help you there.  Then decide what your main keywords are going to be… and that when you go find your own dotcom.  We grab all our domain names from ShopSmartDomains.  Their prices are the best we've found.

Free Software
Nowadays, it's easily possible to build a website using nothing but software you can get for free – most of the best scripting languages are free, and each one has had a lot of free software built for it by hobbyists. Check out sourceforge.net, which is a big repository of free software.

You might think that free software would be less functional than paid-for software, but you'd be wrong. Plenty of free software is simply implementations of standard software, and it works perfectly well – if you want a forum, for example, there's no clear advantage in paying massive license fees to vBulletin (the biggest seller of forum software) instead of just installing the free phpBB.  The free software gives you more flexibility, and yet comes at no cost.

Free software has become an ideological movement, for people who want to be able to modify their own software, and much of the free software out there is quickly becoming widely-used and standard. Using free software doesn't make you look cheap, because users are used to seeing it everywhere – even better, the chances are that they already know how to use it.

If you can't find the software you need, for free… try GottaHaveSoftware for quality.

Templates
Thank goodness for templates.  This is the absolutely easiest way for you to put together your first website.  Do a search for "free templates" or "premium templates" depending on your budget.  Try one of the free templates, but search through it to see what you're "paying" for it.  Generally there's a link included to someone else's site.  If it's a business site you're putting together… don't do this.

MyOwnMinisite may have the answer to your first site… all the personalization is done for you.  Or you'll find other templates for sale right here on Graphics Choice.

Hosting
Your site needs to be "hosted" to appear on the world wide web.  A lot of people just getting started online decide to use somewhere "free" to host their site.  They then regret it later.  "Free" means no cost, but it also generally means that other people's advertising appears on your site.  If you're starting a new business, that looks bad. 

Go do a Google search for webhosting or do what we do… use ShopSmartHosting.  For a brand new business, just start with the lowest plan, the Bronze which gives you 60mb space and 5000mb bandwidth for just $5.95 a month.  That's really, really inexpensive for a hosting plan that guarantees 99% uptime (your guarantee that, at worst, your site will be live 99% of the time.  You'll find no better guarantee anywhere on the net.

Guerrilla Marketing
Finally, one of the biggest costs associated with any website is marketing it.  Simply having your site online is not going to attract visitors/potential customers.  Whether you're planning to pay for banner ads or ads in search engines, marketing can be a big cost. You can save money, though, by resorting to more 'guerrilla' techniques, such as becoming involved in online communities that you think might be interested in your website. For example, joining forums special to your chosen niche.  Do a search "yourmainkeywordforums".  Include the inverted commas but substitute "yourmainkeyword" for the real thing. 

The biggest free marketing technique out there is SEO (search engine optimisation), which is when you build your website in a way that makes it more attractive to search engines, getting you targeted visitors for free.

And the other, most used, marketing tactic is to put together some informative articles on your special subject and submitting them (for free) to article directories like TheArticleCollection.  Very simply, anyone who visits an article directory is allowed to download the articles they'd like to use on their own site… as long as they include the author's details (link to your site). 

Taking it Further
Once you've built your budget website, do you need to upgrade it later on when you start to get lots of visitors? Often, the answer is no. You might wish to pay a professional designer to improve your design, but in most cases the path from a budget website to a big one isn't all that costly either.  You might think you're building a website 'on the cheap' but, really, that's the most sensible way to do it when you're first getting started online.