|
by: Stefan Mischook of www.killersites.com
1. No page counters: Page counters do nothing
except make you look like an amateur, mess with your design and
tell people information about your site you probably don’t
want them to know! If you want to know how many people are hitting
your site, just ask your host for server stats. Any host worth
it’s salt should be able to provide you with detailed stats
that make page counters look stupid.
2. Forget blinking or flashing text: The only
place you see blinking and or flashing text is on the neon signs
of naked bars or circle 1995-96 web sites! People don’t
like them and expect to see naked people inside sites or buildings
that have them … enough said.
3. Make your titles on your web page make sense:
One of the core attributes of a web page is its title. In between
the <title> </title> tags you can specify the page's
title as it appears in the browsers top title bar and in the search
engine results.
People pay attention to page titles, so you should make sure that
they are clear. If you have a page on how to take care of dogs
and you happen to have a dog named ‘Jimmy’ don’t
title your page: ‘How to look after Jimmy and his furry
friends.’ You should title you page something like: ‘How
to take care of dogs.’
4. Don’t force people to download a new browser
of special plug-in to see your site: Unless you have
a site that people are dying to see, why limit your audience because
you want to use some special features in a browser or a plug-in
like Flash. Today, with proper use of CSS and HTML you can present
fantastic looking pages without having to jump through the hoops
old timers like me had to when garbage browsers like Netscape
4 were being used in great numbers.
5. Think twice before using framesets: In the
olden days you could argue a use for framesets because of HTML’s
lousy layout capabilities. Today with CSS positioning being well
supported by all the major browsers there is no need to use framesets
for just about 99.9% of websites. Why don’t you want to
use framesets you ask? Well beginners tend to have trouble creating
and using them properly. Framesets tend to make websites more
complicated than they need to be and finally they can cause you
all kinds of problems with the search engines.
6.
Don’t try any stupid cheat tricks in an attempt to fool
the search engines: In the past we webmasters developed
various nefarious (disreputable) methods in an attempt to get
higher rankings in the search engines. Tactics included putting
hundreds of key words on the pages as invisible text etc …
These tactics may have had some limited success in the past, but
those days are long gone. Try to fool Google (the king of search
engines) and you and your web site will die a horrible and painful
death! I will not describe how to get high rankings now, but keep
this is mind: good content honestly presented is the foundation
of high rankings and high traffic for your site.
7. Chat rooms: Most people don’t give a
crap about chat rooms. And worst than having a chat room is an
empty chat room! Who wants to hang out at a club that has nobody
inside? So unless you have a web site with tens of thousands of
visitors a month and is of a subject that might necessitate a
chat room, don't do it.
8. Flash intros: I am guilty of this as much
as the next guy. A few years back Flash intros where all the rage,
not sure if anyone knew why we ‘needed’ them, but
as it turns out the ‘skip intro’ button is the 2nd
most clicked on the web today. Don’t waste your time on
Flash intros and in my opinion Flash should be only used in special
situations.
9. Under construction pages: Just forget it,
if the page is not ready, don’t put it up. If you have links
that are pointing to the pages, disable them until your page is
ready. If your page is truly ‘under construction’
and has content on it that is ready to be seen by your web surfers,
just post a ‘last updated’ date and make sure you
get the new content in place soon. What ever you do, don’t
put one of those cheesy ‘under construction’ images
on the page. |
