6 Fatal Design Flaws “Newbie” Web Designers Make:These Mistakes Will Kill Your First Website Baby Written by Mitone Griffith
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4. Fatal Flaw Four—Out of Control Scroll Similar to number three, is out of control scroll. This is when you have to scroll text left to right as well as up and down. This happens when newbies design their websites larger than 800 pixels wide. SOLUTION—Most people view resolution at 800x600. Set your table widths around 750 and everyone will be able to look at your site without using a bottom scrollbar. 5. Fatal Flaw Five—Gargantuan Images This is when newbies take photos directly off their scanner or digital camera without resizing and without compressing. And nothings worse than landing on a page that has an image taking over whole screen, taking forever to download. SOLUTION—Using a photo program like Paint Shop, Photo Shop or other, resize images to fit in table you intend to put it in. (Usually under 500 pixels wide.) Compress to 72 dots per inch. (DPI) Photos scanned or taken for print are large and usually at 300 dpi—no one wants to wait on those! 6. Fatal Flaw Six—Nonsense Affiliate Links This is same as “sites with no value.” There’s nothing that looks more like a newbie did it than a page full of banners, buttons, and text links taking visitors away from Newbie’s site. SOLUTION—At least publish free articles on topic of your affiliate program. For example, let’s say you’ve signed up for a “make money selling traffic” idea. There are thousands of free articles that you can publish on getting more website traffic. Put your affiliate link at bottom, top, or middle of page article is published on. Not only will having content make your site more interesting, it will also make your site more valuable to search engines. These are just 6 little mistakes. But if you can at least change these, you are well on your way to having a more saleable site!
Mitone Griffith has designed websites since 1999. Her streamlined 24 Hour Website Wizard assists you in creating your website in less time than it takes to get a book on HTML to ship from Amazon. Give her Wizard 24 hours. Invest a low $199. You’ll have a complete and custom website overnight. Nothing to lose with 100% satisfaction money back guarantee. Visit http://24hourwebsitewizard.com to learn more, or email to thewiz@24hourwebsitewizard.com
| | Designing your Web Site for ALL BrowsersWritten by David Bell
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To have better control, consider using fixed pixel width. However, you must now start making some compromises. If you want to offer a site that looks good at 640X480, you will need to set your table width to 600 -- 620 MAX! You will want to center table in window to provide a nice look when wider windows are used. However, if your visitor has monitor resolutions set to 1600X800 and has browser "maximized" your page will have 500 pixels of blank space on either side of your 600 pixel table. Fortunately, few people will be browsing at this configuration. My experience visiting clients, friends, and family suggests that, even if monitor resolution is set at over 1000 pixels, actual width of browser window will be reduced to something less. You must decide if you will risk an odd looking page for those few who have HUGE monitor resolution or risk annoying scroll bar for those with basic 640X480 #3 Compromise your Font Use. Supposing you select a fixed width table and have a cell that is 300 pixels wide. You write a headline in this cell, pick a font, and size it to look just right. Good for you. Too bad that headline will come up different on different systems. Even on same computer, there are very slight differences between how Netscape and IE render fonts. Remember 1 in 8 visitor using a Mac? For technical reason it is beyond scope of this article to describe, fonts are significantly smaller on a Mac than on Windows. Don't forget that your visitors can also set default size for font display in their browser, too. If they do that, you are really starting to lose control of how fonts are displayed! One solution is to use cascading style sheets, but that technique goes beyond casual designer's typical experiences. The other solution is to compromise. Make sure that it looks good on predominant platform -- currently Windows -- but don't use smallest font possible either or your Mac visitors won't be able to read it! #4 Check Your Final on Multiple Platforms I commit to my web design clients that their site will be look good to ALL visitors. To make sure this is case, I have an Intel computer as well as my Macintosh. I have Intel computer configured to boot into Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Linux. I test all pages I design in these environments. I test in both Netscape and Internet Explorer on Windows systems and Mac. I enlist a partner to test with Lotus Notes and AOL. This may seem excessive, but frequently there will be some little thing that shows up in one of platform/browser configurations that requires some minor correction. Would it be good enough if I did not make correction? Probably. However, it is always best to make a good first impression and on web, where you have about 5 to 7 seconds to get visitors to commit to take an actual look, every little thing counts. If you do not have access to multiple platforms, enlist your friends. Stop by a library or a Kinkos and use their computers (often these places may have Macintosh computers as well as Windows computers). These four simple suggestions are beginning of a journey toward much larger goal of making content of your web site universally available to your visitors. Ultimately, reaching this goal depends upon many factors. However, progress toward this goal must commence with awareness. Understanding that your site will appear differently on different browsers and based on different user preference settings is an important first step toward awareness. Using tables and being conscientious with your use of fonts takes you one step further. Checking your work on various systems will begin to hint at how much further you have to go. But, every journey must begin somewhere.... I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.
David Bell is Manager, Online Marketing, at http://www.wspromotion.com/ , a leading Search Engine Optimization services firm and Advertising Agency.
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