Mistakes That WILL Mark You As A Rookie
Maybe it shouldn't matter so much, but the fact is that people WILL judge your business by the presentation you make on the net, and a clean, professional looking site goes a long way toward building confidence in your business in the eyes of your potential customer. Don't drive them away by making these common mistakes!- Use of busy backgrounds - These are just plain hard on your visitors. You don't see background images in books so why put them on your web site? If you must use a colored background, make it very light.
- Overuse of animated images, of any sort - Just don't, OK?
- Hit Counters - Even though everyone likes to know how many visitors have been to a site, putting a hit counter on it will absolutely mark you as a rookie. Most web hosts have tools that will let you know about your visitors without having to have a visible hit counter.
- Free web hosts and free email accounts - You can get away with this for awhile, especially if the rest of your site is professional looking, but sooner or later, you'll need to upgrade to your own domain or, at the very least, register a domain and repoint it to your free host.
- Extra-wide pages that force horizontal scrolling - If your page is so wide that your visitor has to scroll to the right to see the entire page, they will find the site contents hard to read and may just leave in frustration.
- Broken Links - If they're important enough to add to your site, they're important enough to check regularly.
- Under Construction signs - By default, all websites are under construction, but there's no need to remind your visitor that you've put a site up before it was really ready.
- Too many ads, banners, etc. - Do you really want to distract your visitor from the main purpose of your site? If there is much more ad content on your site than your primary content, you'll come across as just trying to push ads at your visitors rather than delivering actual content of interest.
- Multiple fonts on any one page - More than three or fonts, at most, throughout your site, will merely confuse your visitor. This is especially key for a business site, since you do not want to be distracting your visitors.
- Different styles on each page - It may be fun to have each page of your site have a different look but it really looks unprofessional.
- Lack of logical navigation - Don't make your visitors guess how to get around on your site - use consistent navigation throughout the site and keep it in the same place on each page.
- Spelling and grammatical errors - Proofread your web site content before putting it online. It really doesn't take that long and it looks far more professional. If you're not sure about how to spell something, look it up! Ditto for common grammatical errors - learn the difference between "you're" and "your" and use them right.
The bottom line is this: Your website's appearance is a very important facet of your business and it may be the only impression you ever make on your customer, so it's worth taking the time to make sure it looks good. If at all possible, have someone else preview your site before you upload any changes to it, preferably in at least two different browsers.
Mary McIndoe, lead designer for TechCraftersNet has been crafting web solutions since 1996 and specializes in data-driven solutions for small businesses.
