In this webmaster tutorial I will show you some of the basic things that a LOT of webmasters do, that are just plain wrong!
1. Spelling and Punctuation
I cannot stress this enough, I have seen SO many sites that are full of the most basic spelling error. Lets face it it takes about 10 seconds to run any text you write through a spell-checker, and if this makes your site look a LOT more professional than surely it is a worthwhile 10 seconds. Macromedia Dreamweaver even has a spell checker built in - simply press shift + F7 and it will check your spelling for you! Punctuation is another important factor in how professional your website looks - god knows I am not the most proficient user of the english language, but at least I read through my work, and try to correct the most obvious errors. On this note I should say that this is NOT the best way to check you're work; if you can you should get somebody else to read it through first, as they will be reading it for the first time, whereas you will (trust me) be just skimming over it - even if you try not to!
2. Gaudiness
What does this mean? By gaudiness I mean anything that looks cheap and nasty - for example if you went to your local shops, and they were all competing for your business would you choose to go in the shop that had put a lot of effort into the presentation, or the cheap and shoddy one, which used images of cheesy salesmen that E-V-E-R-Y other shop has already used? The same applies to web design - if you litter you're pages with those free animated .gifs that are all over the place, a lot of users will simply leave - so don't use that animated .gif of the flames!
3. Too Much, Too Much!
Leading on from gaudiness, this is one thing that can make things look cheap - if you attempt something that is far beyond your abilities it will most likely not come off very well - so if you've only been using Photoshop don't expect to be producing the next shadowness straight away! Similarly, don't try to include every tutorial that you have done into your layout - sometimes less really IS more.
4. Overload of content
So you have lots of content? Good - don't make the mistake of putting it all in one list, your users won't be able to cope well with the options available to them - as a general rule 7 links is a good number to stop at in one particular list - if you need to show more, then split the content into sections, and use headings - notice how my content is split into tutorials, community, downloads etc. - this is because having all the sections in one list is too much. Good examples of how to split up a LOT of content are http://www.amazon.com and http://download.com.com - an example of where (in my opinion) there are too many links are http://www.yahoo.com - notice how although the links are split into sections, they still seem to be everywhere!
5. The < blink > tag
Never, never, never, never, never, never .... ever use this tag!
6. Designing for 1 user (usually yourself!)
This is a problem that is amazingly widespread among webmasters - they design their site only for their resolution, their operating system, and their browser - this is NO good! By doing this you are alienating a massive potential target audience - a user that comes to you're site using a mozilla browser, and notices that images are all over the place will NOT come back, except to mock or make an example of you. A good idea to avoid this is to download Mozilla Firebird which is a fully standards compliant browser, and therefore (by and large) if it works in Firebird, it will work in Internet Explorer - if you want your site to work in all major resolutions (800x600 and above) then it should fit in a 750px space width wise. As for testing in other operating systems - you will just have to find someone with it, and get them to send you a screenshot!
Conclusion
You have learned 5 valuable web design tips, which may seem like common sense, but I have seen these mistakes made so many times it is unreal!
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