Description: This article details critical mistakes made during website design, development, and deployment.

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==================Begin Article HERE======================== Top 10 Biggest Mistakes of Website Design By Scott Whitney Copyright © 2002 All Rights Reserved

Here's a seemingly easy question: What is goal of EVERY website in world?

Ask this question of most website developers, and answer will be same; "Uh, that depends on what you want, Mr. Cu$tomer."

The *real* answer, however, is quite clear:

The goal of EVERY website in world is to increase probability of engagement (with visitor, so you can sell, support, or tell your story), and decrease risk of exit (from site, resulting in competitive engagement).

To that end, there are three (3) areas of interest that must be addressed when developing and maintaining a website:

~ Technical ~ Design ~ Marketing

Technical Mistakes --------------------------

1. Not taking advantage of medium (or, I Can't Breathe!). Surprisingly enough, some of BIGGEST Websites in world fail to actually put technology available to them to work. What do we mean? Specifically, DOES THE SITE B-R-E-A-T-H-E?

A Breathe-able site is one that is able to automatically reformat its content to fit a user's screen, regardless of their screen size. When designing a website, in order to make experience pleasurable and as user-friendly as possible, make sure that regardless of visitor's screen size, contents fits perfectly. In other words, if you design your site for a user with a 640 x 480 screen, anybody with a bigger screen (800 x 600, 1024 x 768, etc.) will be forced to look at a BUNCH of white space.

Interestingly enough, folks who come from desktop publishing world create many of sites that do this. And while they often make pretty Websites, theirs is a world where a dynamic, re- sizable "page" didn't exist. Well, it does today, so if you REALLY want to make experience a pleasurable one for your visitor, take time to make your site BREATHE!

2. Forcing a visitor to scroll from left to right Have you even been to a Website where you found yourself having to scroll screen left to right to read all content? Chances are, you have. Chances are also that after a while, you decided against doing much of it. This is mainly because, while it is intuitive to read down a page, it's less so left to right.

The visual distraction of having content cut off right side is very disconcerting. You'll see a great many sites do this for simple reason that developer forced an absolute size width of his web page, instead of allowing it to fit within users screen (see #1). Bottom line? If you make your visitor scroll from left to right, they'll likely stroll to another site.

3. Dead Links There really is no excuse for this one. Every Website development environment worth its salt has ability to check integrity of all its internal links. And although it may not be able to check integrity of links that lead a user somewhere outside of your site, if it's important enough to link to, isn't it important enough to see if it exists?

Design Mistakes ----------------------------------

4. Ransom Note Design Sites that suffer from this mistake fall into three categories;

~ Sites that spent time on creating a nice home page, but forgot that a visitor might actually go beyond that page,

~ Sites whose webmaster is determined to use every color, font, graphic, and animated logo and cool Flash movie he can get his hands on, and

~ Sites that fail to use a consistent formatting technique.

Basic, traditional marketing is as relevant as ever. The Four P's - product, price, place (distribution), and promotion - are still very much alive. Strategic thinking, segmenting, and targeting can still earn you a competitive advantage. Marketing is still a process of a) determining what our customers need and want, b) planning how we are going to meet those needs and wants, and then c) implementing our plan. We still have products, services, and ideas to sell at some price. We still deliver to our customers via some means of distribution. We still promote and we still advertise. Those are basics. The basics still exist and always will.