In the world of web design, there are plenty of mistakes you can make, and in this article, I’m going to look at what I believe to be the top 10 biggest. You need to check your site for these mistakes right now, and fix them if they’re there – otherwise you’re going to be annoying your visitors and driving them away from your site.

1. Unclear Layout and Navigation. Many websites, especially business sites, seem to suffer from some kind of disease where even the very simplest task takes ten steps to achieve. If people are emailing you to ask you how to do things on your site, then you need to improve your layout and navigation. Remember: if there are certain tasks people seem to want to do more often, put them on the front page.

2. Plugin Overload. You’ve got to keep media that uses plugins to a strict maximum of one per page: that means that if you’ve got Flash, then you can’t have a media player, or if you’re using Java then you can’t have Flash. It’s not as bad to use the same plugin twice, however.

3. Unclear Linking. You might think it looks better to only show links when people put their mouse over them, or not make their colour stand out too much from the rest of the text, but it’s not – while it might make the design look nicer, it makes it far less usable. Use a clearly contrasting colour for links, and preferably underline them.

4. Too Many Ads. When you’re trying to make money from your website, it’s all too easy to try to fit in more ads than you really should, or start using ad formats that are too intrusive. If you’ve put a new ad on your site, go to the site as if you were a visitor, and ask yourself honestly: is this just too much?

5. Strange Fonts. Stick to the most common web fonts: that’s pretty much just Arial, Georgia, Tahoma and Verdana. If you’re using more obscure fonts, then most visitors probably won’t have them – and the ones that do will find your text hard to read. The only time you should use non-standard fonts is in your logo or in headings, if they are displayed as an image.

6. Flash Intros. Please, don’t use a Flash intro on your website. You’d think everyone would realise they’re a bad idea by now, but every web designer still gets clients who just don’t seem to realise that Flash intros are universally mocked and hated. Don’t be one of those people.

7. Unlabelled Email Links. It’s a very bad idea to ever use a link that will send email (a mailto link) without clearly marking it with the word ‘email’. If you just make clicking people’s names send email, you’ll annoy visitors who just clicked wanting to find out more about the person.

8. Broken Links. You’ve got to check all your links regularly to make sure that they all still work. There’s nothing worse than finding a site that looks useful, only to find that it hasn’t been updated in years and none of the links work any more. Yes, a website does mostly run itself after a while, but that doesn’t mean that you should neglect the essential maintenance it needs from time to time.

9. No Marking for External Links. There are two kinds of links: internal (to other parts of your website) and external (to other websites). For the benefit of your visitors, though, it’s best if you mark external links, either by making them a different colour or using some kind of a symbol (a box with an arrow is the usual one). It’s also good to make the external links open in new windows, so people aren’t leaving your site altogether when they click them.

10. Badly-sized Text. It’s important to keep your text around the standard size (preferably just below). Making text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many visitors. The best thing you can do is use relative text sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user’s preferred text size. You might also consider offering buttons on your site to decrease or increase the size.

About the Author

To discover more on creating websites, internet marketing and promoting your website, simply follow these links: Freelance Web Design Wellington NZ | Make Money Online – Internet Marketing Resources

Traffic generation is one of the most talked about, most needed, and probably the area where people waste the most amount of money. The ability to generate traffic to your website is a significant factor that determines a websites online success. There are many ways to generate traffic to your site and I’ll discuss a few here. One thing to keep in mind when generating traffic is this. It is not so much the amount of traffic you generate but the quality of that traffic that is more important. When I say quality traffic I mean targeted traffic. Having visitors to your site who are interested in what you have to offer is a far cry from just anyone stopping by.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, many sites don’t have the resources that others have to increase web site traffic. When your first starting out online it can be hard to generate traffic to your site let alone targeted traffic. One of the quickest ways to generate traffic when first starting out is through writing and submitting articles. Article marketing is a powerful source of generating traffic and generating back links to your website. We’ll discuss backlinks in a moment but first let’s talk about article marketing.

As I stated above, article marketing is a powerful source of generating traffic and generating back links to your website. Article marketing of course is the process of writing articles and submitting them to the various online article directories and websites that accept articles for the purpose of generating direct traffic and back links to your website. When submitting articles to the article directories you are allowed to leave an author bio. In this author bio you can write a short call to action, use your writing skills to make someone want to click through to your site, and leave an actual link to your site. When the article directories publish your articles, you receive backlinks to your web site thus generating traffic.

The really great thing about submitting articles to directories is that after it is published other site owners can post that article on their site. For a site owner to post your article on their site they have to also post the author’s bio as well. And of course with the author’s bio comes a direct link back to your site. This can be done by tens and even hundreds of site webmaster’s all creating backlinks and generating traffic to your site.

Another way to drive traffic to your site is through one-way or reciprocal links. There are three ways to acquire links: (1) you can pay for them; (2) you can join a free link exchange; and/or (3) you can manually add links. Some examples of attaining one-way links would be through article marketing, writing press releases and submitting your site to directories. Building incoming links done properly will repay the effort and your site will not be subject to the whims of the search engines.

As your number of backlinks increases, your web site will rise in search engine rankings for the keywords around which your web site is optimized. The more links you have pointing to your website, the higher your Page Rank may be. The amount of traffic that can be attained from being on the first page of the Google results for a particular search term is tremendous. Let’s discuss what search engines are and what they can do for your site’s traffic needs.

The search engines are the primary sources of site traffic. The search engines take a customer’s desired keyword(s) and provides them with the most relevant results it can find. These search engines are major providers of free web site traffic and can assist even small online businesses to operate successfully.

The core way to ranking high in the search engines is though the development of a linking strategy. The more relevant and high quality sites your have directly linking to you the better. The incoming links you have to your site will tell the search engines you are important and therefore place you higher in their search results. The higher you are in the results the more traffic you will receive, guaranteed.

Traffic generation is of course important because without traffic, you generally do not have a business. Traffic generation is a significant factor that determines a websites online success. Many big companies generate tens of thousands of visitors a day and a measly ten to fifteen percent actually buys, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with good business. The key is to drive as much targeted traffic to your site as possible. Do this and your business will thrive.

About the Author

Hi, I’m Shane Wilson and I want to thank you for reading my article. For more information on Elite Marketing Resources online then I invite you to stop by http://www.marketingdossier.com. It’s all free.