When you begin designing Web sites, there are a lot of ways to go wrong in what you’re trying to accomplish. The following is a list of what not do, and how to do things correctly.
Over Complicated Design Schemes/Layouts
Keep designs basic, putting in more than the eye can handle will cause visitors to leave your site. Before you start coding your site, reevaluate your layout - even if you have to go back and start from wireframe.
Not Sizing and Saving Images/Graphics for Best Use
Make sure to pay attention to image sizes, prevent aliasing when saving and decrease load time. If images are larger than they need to be, it will take longer to load them, even if they don’t appear as big on the Web page.
Using Tables Instead of Divs
While tables serve their purpose in a Web site (tabular data) they should not be used for your layout or navigation. Your code will get unnecessarily bloated in a hurry if you use tables where they don’t belong, which makes it overly difficult for anyone coming after you to edit or make updates to the site.
Not Keeping Consistent Design on Every Page
This is a classic sign of a complete novice. Your Web site is the online face of your company, band or whatever you may be promoting or using the site for. Let’s say a visitor finds your site through a Google search and the first page they are taken to is the “About Us” page. It has a nice blue header, white background and black text - not the best but clean and professional. The visitor likes what they read so they click to the “Home Page” and all of a sudden they’re on what appears to be a completely different site. Now there is an orange header, black backroung and white text. The visitor will quickly be wondering to themselves if they’re even still on the same site.
Let’s Find the Navigation
This also falls under “not keeping consistent design on every page”. If your navigation is horizontally placed just under your header on one page and vertically placed in the left column on the next, visitors are forced to play “find the navigation” on every new page, and that game sucks. Also make sure that all of your links work before you publish your site, article or update.
Not Checking in All Browsers
Designers need to make sure their design works on all of the major Web browsers. Fortunately, there’s only one Web site you need to go to to make sure that your design work. It’s called BrowserShots. Use it.
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