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Are you making them?

Everyone makes mistakes when they're designing websites. It doesn't matter whether you're a newbie or someone with years of experience; we all make mistakes. Sadly though, some people go on making the same mistakes over and over again.

There's been plenty said and written about some of those basic mistakes we all make so I'm not going to rehash them here. Instead I thought I might talk about a few fundamental mistakes that people don't always talk about. As I look around the Net I see these mistakes happening quite often so they could just be something you're doing too.

Alt text
One of the first things you should have learnt in this industry from whatever newbie board you landed on was the importance of adding alt. text to images. Back when Steve and I started there were still plenty of people who surfed with images turned off because bandwidth, from their internet service provider, was expensive. So back then it was important to include alt. text to describe the image and you would see that point stressed again and again.

These days alt. text is still important but for a totally different reason. These days alt. text is important because if gives us a chance to add in some extra keywords and keyword phrases ... as long as we don't go crazy and stuff the alt. text with those words and terms we're targeting.

However there are occasions when you wouldn't want to use alt. text at all. What if the alt. text was going to get in the way of something very important ... like the navigation?

Yes, sometimes the alt. text does get in the way of something that's more important. Yesterday I was checking a competitor's site for one of our clients and found that very problem. Whoever had built the site had decided to use images for navigation with a drop-down menu that appeared when you hovered over the image. They'd also included alt. text with every button and the end result was that parts of the drop-down menu were unusable because the alt. text covered parts of the menu. And that leads me to the next point.

Javascript
You can do some wonderful things with Javascript but what if your surfers have javascript turned off? Of course you might think that everyone surfs with javascript turned on but the fact is they don't. Some studies suggest that as many as 30% of all surfers are out there on the Net with Javascript turned off.

So if your stats package relies on Javascript is it really all that accurate? If you use Google Analytics is it really giving you a true picture of what's happening on your site? If you're totally reliant on Javascript for your navigation are you preventing surfers from getting to any of your pages except the one they happened to land on?

Landing and splash pages
Way back when some of us first got our start building web sites every surfer arrived at your site via the index page. That was the front door to your site and so people put a lot of effort into making that front door look pretty. Here in adult we at least understood just how important it was to make that index page load quickly so we didn't push the limits as much as mainstream did.

Over there they turned the index page into a major production. They added Flash and music and turned it into an all-singing all-dancing production that Hollywood would have been proud of but most surfers never hung around to see it load ... and then the Net changed.

These days any page on a site can be a landing page. Traffic can arrive at a site via any page, not just the index page. Some sites are so poorly designed and optimized that the contact page is the page that appears first in the major search engines ... but so many web designers are still living back in the glitzy index page days.

We're continually seeing new sites being turned out in mainstream with splash pages that cost an arm and a leg but are totally irrelevant because no one will see them. So if you're still building index pages like that do yourself a favor and take a look at what is really working these days.

Music
One of the things that was drummed into me when I first started was that sound - of any kind - was a major no-no on an adult site and that's definitely something that I still agree with. Over in mainstream lots of websites use sound ... but not very effectively. In fact quite often the noise - whether it is music or something else can be absolutely counter-productive.

We recently produced a website for a client that includes sound (music and the spoken word) on the index page but it's relevant, it plays once and it only plays if the surfer hits the play button. All too often you will see web designers use music that plays over and over again and adds little or no value to website at all.

Well there are just a few things to think about. There are plenty of other mistakes I see out there every day and if you look you will see them too. Hopefully you won't see them in websites you've designed.