My goal with Killersites.com is to teach
how to build great sites while making it as easy as possible
for people. I’m trying to do this with ‘to the point’
articles and newsletters. As such I have avoided a diatribe
of things like the history of HTML and left out some of the
marginal options in web design. Instead I've focused on
those things that have come up often in my own experiences
over the years.There are many
options available when creating web pages, many good and
many bad. The following is a list of some of those options
and how I think you should deal with them.
Some things you should do and not do
in your web pages:
1. No page counters:
Page counters do nothing except make you look like an
amateur, mess with your design and tell people information
about your site you probably don’t want them to know! If you
want to know how many people are hitting your site, just ask
your host for server stats. Any host worth it’s salt should
be able to provide you with detailed stats that make page
counters look stupid.
2. Forget blinking or flashing
text: The only place you see blinking and or
flashing text is on the neon signs of naked bars or web
sites made in the mid 90's! People don’t like them and
expect to see naked people inside sites or buildings that
have them … enough said.
3. Make your titles on your
web page make sense: One of the core attributes of
a web page is its title. In between the <title> </title>
tags you can specify the page's title as it appears in the
browsers top title bar and in the search engine results.
People pay attention to page titles,
so you should make sure that they are clear. If you have a
page on how to take care of dogs and you happen to have a
dog named ‘Jimmy’ don’t title your page: ‘How to look after
Jimmy and his furry friends.’ You should title you page
something like: ‘How to take care of dogs.’
4. Don’t force people to
download a new browser of special plug-in to see your site:
Unless you have a site that people are dying to see, why
limit your audience because you want to use some special
features in a browser or a plug-in like Flash. Today, with
proper use of CSS and HTML you can present fantastic looking
pages without having to jump through the hoops old timers
like me had to when garbage browsers like Netscape 4 were
being used in great numbers.
5. Think twice before using
framesets: In the olden days you could argue a use
for framesets because of HTML’s lousy layout capabilities.
Today with CSS positioning being well supported by all the
major browsers there is no need to use framesets for just
about 99.9% of websites. Why don’t you want to use framesets
you ask? Well beginners tend to have trouble creating and
using them properly. Framesets tend to make websites more
complicated than they need to be and finally they can cause
you all kinds of problems with the search engines.
6. Don’t try any stupid cheat tricks in an attempt
to fool the search engines: In the past we
webmasters developed various nefarious (disreputable)
methods in an attempt to get higher rankings in the search
engines. Tactics included putting hundreds of key words on
the pages as invisible text etc … These tactics may have had
some limited success in the past, but those days are long
gone. Try to fool Google (the king of search engines) and
you and your web site will die a horrible and painful death!
I will not describe how to get high rankings now, but keep
this is mind: good content honestly presented is the
foundation of high rankings and high traffic for your site.
7. Chat rooms: Most
people don’t give a crap about chat rooms. And worst than
having a chat room is an empty chat room! Who wants to hang
out at a club that has nobody inside? So unless you have a
web site with tens of thousands of visitors a month and is
of a subject that might necessitate a chat room, don't do
it.
8. Flash intros: I am
guilty of this as much as the next guy. A few years back
Flash intros where all the rage, not sure if anyone knew why
we ‘needed’ them, but as it turns out the ‘skip intro’
button is the 2nd most clicked on the web today. Don’t waste
your time on Flash intros and in my opinion Flash should be
only used in special situations.
9. Under construction pages:
Just forget it, if the page is not ready, don’t put it up.
If you have links that are pointing to the pages, disable
them until your page is ready. If your page is truly ‘under
construction’ and has content on it that is ready to be seen
by your web surfers, just post a ‘last updated’ date and
make sure you get the new content in place soon. What ever
you do, don’t put one of those cheesy ‘under construction’
images on the page.
There are many other things not listed
here, but it will have to wait until the next article.
