Avoid these common errors
Highly distracting patterned back- grounds, dark colors, difficult to read text, numerous type faces on the same page, pages that require you to scroll horizontally, numerous animations on same page, and unoptomized grahics
Many relatively good websites are not successful because designers fail to account for numerous considerations. Making these mistakes will spell your doom! To create a spectacular website that no one sees, is an exercise in futility.
The number one consideration has to be SPEED! How fast do your pages load? If your pages are over 100 kb it is time to re-design! Not many will wait around for slow loading pages. Do yout?
Loading Speed - Graphics, such as: animation, movies, animated text, large photos, and other graphic elements can cause huge slow downs.
Solutions:
1. Optimize all grahics that are to be used
2. Check whether changing to a gif or jpeg reduces the size
without compromising the quality.
3. Eliminate all but the most essential
4. Don't use graphics to make your site look neat or to display
your site building skills, use them because they are really
needed.
5. Pre-load images of repeated used graphics
6. Use clickable thumbnails instead of huge pictures.
7. Create additional pages if several graphics are needed and
spread them out.
Frequently - Less is more!
Text - Many websites make huge errors in this area - using typefaces that are unreadable, too many styles, too big or too small fonts and ones that can't be read.
Solutions:
1. Don't use decorative typefaces for headlines or body copy.
(use standards such as: Helvetica, Times Roman, Arial, etc)
2. Stay with one typeface or related typefaces on a page.
3. Ensure that it is highly readable - by contrasting it with the
background color.
4. Use italics, boldface, underlines, and letter/type color and
size effectively for variety rather changing type faces.
Type that is hard to see, DISTRACTING, and difficult to read is annoying at best!
