The seven deadly sins of web design.

Hi everyone, once again its Jon from Hyperloop Hoops here, giving the techier side of marketing, but specifically with regards to internet technologies.
Today I will be looking at designing websites, and what not to do!

Scrolling banners and signs.
These can be a major distraction to your users. Its best not to have more than zero animated what-not visible at a time. That's right, zero. Don't use them. They don't catch people's eyes, they instead make them bleed!


Creating an "Under Construction" page.
Why bother creating a page saying: "We are creating a page!"? It really is a waste of time. Instead - just create the page you are going to end up with! In business, if your product is not ready, you do not create a temporary product announcing that your real product is being made!


Having a stationary background picture regardless of screen scrolling (or just having a repeated animated background).
This is a personal choice - However when I see these, it really starts to make me feel nauseous. Done correctly it can be ok, but if done badly - it really is horrific and looks like a 8 year old designed the page (no offence to any of you 8 year old web designers! (unless your pages ARE rubbish!) )


Hard to read text (wrong text colour compared to background colour).
Yellow text on a red background is very hard to read. Not only do visually impaired people have trouble reading small text, or bad contrast, but dyslexics do too. Its best to stick to high contrasting colours for the text and background.


Having music starting automatically.
When Im browsing the web, or just using my computer in general, I have Windows Media Player on "play all" and "random". I *really* don't want a bad MIDI recreation to start playing, and there be no "stop" button. To be honest, I think its one of the reasons I stayed away from MySpace as much as I have done - I really don't want to be shocked by a) Music randomly starting on a site and b) your musical tastes. I must admit though, I did do this when I first started creating sites when I was 13 or so, but I have realised the error of my ways. In my opinion, if a site starts to play me music and I need to make it quieter ASAP - I will just close the page rather than turn the volume down.


Image sizes too large - difference between dimensions and file size.
The average web user will spend 10 seconds waiting for a page to load. If your site contains lots of high resolution pictures, this will slow your site to a crawl as it needs to wait for them to load. Lots of people I know get confused about how "big" a picture is. There is 'file size' "big", and there is 'dimensions' "big". The file size is the important thing you need to watch here - the largest size a file should be is about 250kb (in my opinion) if there are lots of pictures on your site. These days, the majority of people have broadband connections meaning pages will load quicker - however, don't offset this by having lots of large size pictures for them to download, as it will be like they are on dial up again (remember how slow it was then?!?!).
Dimensions can be whatever you like, but bear in mind as a general rule of thumb, the larger the dimensions, the larger the file size. Of course, a big picture with only one colour will be much smaller than a picture half with size, with lots of different colours in.


Political/ religious views on a non-political/ religious website.
Unless your site has a religious or political viewpoint, you really shouldn't put up any personal beliefs especially if it is a commercial site. You obviously want to make as much money as you can, and you do this by appealing to as many people as you can. By posting things like "We support our Troops in Iraq" or "Land rights for gay whales" - you will alienate your site from those who do not agree with you, and they will instantly be less persuaded to buy from you.

Things to look at for examples:

• http://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/main.htm - Specifically how to design a bad site


• http://www.fredfrap.com/ - umm.... image? For those of us browsing in firefox there is no image and the page is just purple. Since looking at it on IE I still have to say EW!


• http://www.tallyhouniforms.com - Lots of bad things (flashing text for example).


• http://web.archive.org/web/20060613061524/http://moire.ch/ - My eeeeeyes! Sweet Jesus no! (mouseover the links)


• http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/archives/sts-108/flash/sts108.swf - Oh dear.. if this is the best NASA can do, we have no hope of reaching Mars...

(by Jon from Hyperloop Hoops)