Many of us are guilty of one or two points in the list below when we first started out building our sites. Many of us still flout these standard tips. This is why we present to you 11 mistakes you must avoid in order to build and develop a great site

When you are getting ready to build that brand new website for your business, you should be aware of some standards you need to follow to bring out the best design for your website. The importance of having a website to showcase your products and services cannot be underrated because that is your 'Virtual office' for your potential clients and regular customers to have a business relationship with you.

A poorly designed website can be a great turnoff and when visitors start leaving your site because of poor and bad design, then you are bound to lose some money and some patronage. How do you stop this from happening? By following the solid 11 points below that will help you in bringing out a great website design.

1. Graphic Laden.

A web page should load in a reasonable amount of time. If you use too many graphics, or graphics that are not scaled and saved in the most efficient format, your pages will take longer to load. Impatient users may bail out and go to another site. Clean and fast should be the goal. You can usually make a very nice layout using HTML and CSS without the whole page being a sliced up graphic.

2. Color Choices.

Just because it looks cool to you doesn't mean everyone will find it easy to read and appreciate your psychedelic color scheme. Try out your color choices on a mix of people before you get too far into your design.

Don't turn people away just because they have trouble reading your site. There are colors for backgrounds and text that perform much better than others colors for some types of sites, do your research first!

3. Animated Graphics.

You want your visitors to concentrate on whatever your site is about. If your pages look like the arcade at an amusement park with animated gifs everywhere they may never get to the part of the site that you want them to, such as the "buy" button. A little animation goes a long way.

4. Flash Splash Screens.

Flash is big these days and very useful for a lot of tasks, however, one thing you should avoid is a big flash welcome page as the default page of your web site. Most people find it very annoying to sit through it, or to have to click a skip button.

5. Cross Browser Compatible Issues.

Always check out your site on the main browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera) a PC and Mac if possible. You'd be surprised how each web browser has its quirks. Sometimes a page will look really bad or completely wrong in one browser and you'll have to spend time correcting the problem. But, you won't know unless you test it... don't rely on your visitors to tell you.

6. Broken Links.

This one should be obvious, check you site's navigation and all the links occasionally. There are some tools available to do this for you if you have a really large site.

7. Disjointed Layout.

Make sure your site is easy to navigate. Have someone who's not familiar with your site use your site. Ask them to purchase something, or find the page for sending in questions, etc. Watch them as they work. Listen to what they have to say and fix your site to make it work better.

8. Incomplete Contact Information.

Keep the contact information on your site is current and complete. Do this as soon as anything changes.

9. Text in Graphics to Make "Pretty Text" vs. Real Text.

Font styles are somewhat limited for web pages. Some people want their site to look really good with fonts like you can use in word processing packages. So how do you do that? You can make it in Adobe PhotoShop or another graphic package and save out your text as images. This works really well as far as looking good, however, because images are naturally larger than text, the pages will load slower. But, the biggest drawback is not size, it's that you have your text, which tells what your site is about, locked up in images. It's not accessible to search engines that crawl web sites.

What does that mean? It means that if you're relying on traffic to your site from search engines, you want real text, not images of text that only humans can read. If your site is not dependent on search engine traffic, then this may not matter other than the slower load time for the image laden pages.

10. Using Something Just To Be Using It.

Don't use flash, or background sounds, or videos that automatically load and start playing, or JavaScript that opens 900 windows. Only use those things when they are necessary, don't use them just because you may know how and want to show off.

11. Not Updating the Site.

As things change you should modify your site to reflect those changes. As you add new products or announce new products, you should add them to your site. As people change in your organization, you should update your site.

Put a blog on your site and update it every day or so. Your web site can be a tremendous asset in your marketing toolkit, but only if it's kept current and fresh.

Use this list of items to make your web site better and more enjoyable for your visitors.

Originally written at http://myresponsivewebdesigns.com/blog/11-common-mistakes-to-avoid-when-building-your-website

nice one

tundexweb:
nice one

Thanks. do you have any points to add?

BLWeb:


Thanks. do you have any points to add?

u have nailed it,but let me add few.
1.set goals for ur website.
2.first know ur targeted audience.
3.write unique contents that contain keywords related to ur products/services,etc.

tundexweb:

u have nailed it,but let me add few.
1.set goals for ur website.
2.first know ur targeted audience.
3.write unique contents that contain keywords related to ur products/services,etc.

Thank you for the points you added. They are very vital points.
can you remove the strike through bbc code in your signature so it can be readable.

BLWeb:


Thank you for the points you added. They are very vital points.
can you remove the strike through bbc code in your signature so it can be readable.

k,thanks.