8) AND SOMEONE-ANYONE-PLEASE! Stop "ultra" dark background accented with an equally dark font! I have discovered many a website in which background, and text fonts, are indistinguishable from each other! It looks like your are staring into a black hole! Lighten things up a bit, and don’t make me turn brightness controls on my monitor to full! And no, I don’t want to highlight text so I can read information on your website!

9) While I love Marcomedia's Flash, I think it should be used sparingly. Unless you have a film site, or a product that requires a detailed visual description, just forget about using flash for e-commerce. There is a majority of people out there who still use those pokey dial-up modems (me being one of them) and I "hate wait!"

Even when I use skip feature it still takes to long for page to load. While doing research for The Ultimate Guide To Products For Resale I noticed that some designer clothing wholesalers where using flash to sell their product. The same applied to retail sellers of designer shoes, designer handbags, and designer clothing.

My question is why? If you are using your site to sell a product, just stick with high quality, fast loading photos, followed up with good creative descriptions of each item. If you have to make people wait to buy your product, people will buy their product somewhere else! If you absolutely, positively, must use Flash, make your files as fast loading as possible, especially if you are selling a product.

10) Solid blocks of text with no breaks between paragraphs. The only industry that gets away with that format is newspaper, book, and magazine publishers. The Internet is a different world altogether. People not only want their information quick, but they also want to read it in smaller, "bit size" portions of content.

I like to skim over articles for main points. If I have to "slog" through content that looks like a rambling diatribe with no paragraph breaks, I’m gone! Make your content clear and concise. Break up your paragraphs, and use plenty of "white space" when possible.

So there they are. My “Top Ten” pet peeves of dysfunctional design! Do you incorporate any of them in your website? When it comes to good design, and great site navigation, think of your website as if you were having guests over to your house. Make your house, as well as your website, “neat and ready to greet!” For more information about how to make your site user friendly, go to Jakob Nielsen's site for tips on better website design and usability.

The drop-dead worst offender is "countdown" script. It works like this: When a visitor goes to sales landing page and doesn't buy, script comes on and makes a fallback offer good only for next 5 minutes or whatever. It will then proceed to remind you every few seconds of approaching END of countdown!

If at all possible your scripting should be cookie driven so that your returning visitors don't have to deal with same thing again. You can setup your script to only activate once per visitor, using identity of cookie in customer's computer.

Good scripting applied in a strategic way can increase your sales and give you more meaningful information about your customers, giving you an edge on competition. It should be used with restraint on key areas of your website to enhance your relationship with your customers.

Scripting can be considered a specialty. Should you feel it's more than you can handle, it's best to pay a seasoned Pro to do it for you. It's not all that expensive and will pay for itself in no time.

Here are sources of scripting I use: http://www.javascript.com/ http://www.scriptarchive.com/

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by Francisco Aloy

(C)2004 Francisco Aloy ============================================== Agreement reminder, not part of article: Please include my working hyperlink in resource box. Remove paragraph before posting.