Even if youre not an accomplished webmaster you can still have a professional looking website. You may be like I was five years agoyoure teaching yourself web design and youre starting to catch on to that HTML stuff. Youre so excited about your new bag of tricksbut slow down partner, sometimes less is more. In fact the only time more is more is when it concerns chocolate cheesecake or something like that. (I can never get enough chocolate!) Youve worked hard to get the trafficnow dont drive them away. 1. Fatal Flaw OneBouncing, Wiggling Animated Clip Art This one is really annoying to website visitors, and a sure sign you dont know what youre doing, especially if you have them all over the place. Just because theyre free, doesnt mean you should use them. SOLUTIONYoure probably not a graphics designer if you resort to using clip art, so dont worry about your weakness, just choose a nice color scheme instead in your tables. (More on that later.) Colors dont take extra time to download either. 2. Fatal Flaw TwoEmbedded Music Clips Good grief. Dont do this. I dont care how catchy your elevator tune is. No one wants to hear it. Sometimes speakers are turned up and a sudden blare of music will scare the heck out of your visitors. Theyll probably leave! SOLUTIONIf you have a site that sells music, then people will expect to hear it sometime somewhere at your site. Make your music links clickablea choice that visitors can make to listen! 3. Fatal Flaw ThreeUnstructured Text I cant stand it when I land on a site that I have to read from each side of my screen to the other left and right as well as up and down. Even if you want to write one long sales letterwhich obviously works fine for hundreds of rich webmasters, you still need to format it into a legible width. SOLUTIONPut your text in one single data cell of a simple table. Center your table. Voila. 4. Fatal Flaw FourOut of Control Scroll Similar to number three, is the 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. SOLUTIONMost 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 FiveGargantuan 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 the whole screen, taking forever to download. SOLUTIONUsing a photo program like Paint Shop, Photo Shop or other, resize images to fit in the 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 dpino one wants to wait on those! 6. Fatal Flaw SixNonsense Affiliate Links This is the same as sites with no value. Theres nothing that looks more like a newbie did it than a page full of banners, buttons, and text links taking visitors away from the Newbies site. SOLUTIONAt least publish free articles on the topic of your affiliate program. For example, lets say youve 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 the bottom, top, or middle of the page the 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! |
