The Creative Dot - Design | Animate | Excite

This is a list of bad website design practices that I have compiled together. Many designers still seem to make these mistakes to this day.

1. Flash, Image or Enter Here Splash pages. For the most part most search engines won’t find anything to index on this page and will ignore it as they don’t have any or very minimal text. There is a time and place for flash, but it isn’t 1999 anymore when Splash and Flash Intro Pages were the main trend. Splash pages don’t serve any purpose to customers, they just want information. Most of the people who come to the website will probably not waste their time watching it and move straight onto the information.
2. Not testing to see that your website works in more than one browser. Test your website in multiple browsers not only e.g. Internet Explorer, test it in other browsers as well e.g. Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, etc.
3. Don’t use scrolling DIV’s. That is what the browser scrollbar is there for. It also becomes annoying when you get 2 scrollbars, namely the DIV’s and the browsers and they start “fighting” with one another when you use the mouse scroll wheel.
4. At any point on your website you have a notice saying “Currently Under Construction“.
5. Making the link test “Click here“, be more specific with your links.
6. The use of frames and iframes. These practices are really outdated and are not very SEO friendly.
7. A website that has been mainly created in Flash and not having an HTML alternative. Not everybody wants to install or knows how to install a Flash Plug-in/Add-on. By doing this you are limiting your website audience.
8. The use of Images instead of Text. Try as far as possible to use pure text, unless a creative style text, etc. is required.
9. Large file downloads that don’t state their size to warn users about how big the file is.
10. Popup and Pop Under. 90% of people will see these open and promptly close them out of habit, because of the virility of Popup/Pop Under Advertising.
11. Background music is just one major annoyance and irritation. Your music isn’t necessarily the same taste as other peoples.
12. Frames and iFrames are just old a tacky. They are not SEO friendly as they tend to either give the user just a menu and not content or content and no menu as search engines don’t read the whole framset page but each page individually thus creating seperate pages on the search engine.

Web Designer Wall has an excellent blog post on the Top 9 SEO Mistakes Made by Designers and Developers

If you know of any other Bad Website Design Practices, leave a comment, I would love to hear what you have to say.

Nicole
The Creative Dot

Tags: Practices, Web Design, Web Development

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 4:41 pm and is filed under General, SEO, Website Design, Website Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. RSS 2.0