When I review people’s websites as part of my website mentoring service, I seem to come across certain problems time and time again. So I’ve compiled all of the commonly made mistakes into a single article. I bet that most of you are making at least 1 mistake on this list!

Initial Impact

These are issues relating to a website when you visit a website for the first time.

1. Purpose of website not obvious

When you first see a webpage, you want visitors to know what the website is about in the first 10 seconds or so. If the website appears irrelevant (even though it is actually relevant) to the visitor, then they will leave. Give the user cues such as related images or short introductory paragraphs of text.

2. Website appears unfinished

If a website looks as if it’s incomplete, you’re giving your visitors a negative impression, particularly if you run a service or business. An incomplete website can imply a lazy or poor service, as if you can’t look after your website, how can you be expected to look after your customers?

3. Websites that take too long to load (if at all)

You should aim to have your website loading within 6 seconds. The faster the better. However, if your website doesn’t load at all, or it takes far too long, you’ll probably lose visitors and they are unlikely to return.

4. Shockwave Flash intro pages

Flash intro pages are very old-fashioned now, where most users will click on the skip link or leave straight away. From a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) perspective, you want your home page to have your most important information, not a flash intro which has little benefit when it comes to search engines.

5. Website breaks in major web browsers

Make sure your website works in the major browsers, including IE (6, 7, 8), Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. Significant issues due to using one of those web browsers will typically not be tolerated by visitors (such as broken layouts, no navigation functionality, etc).

6. Lack of a domain name

Don’t rely on free web hosting for your website address. e.g. mysite.freehosting.com looks very unprofessional. Buy a domain name, they start at around £7 for 2 years for a .co.uk domain.

7. Audio that plays when you visit a website

Any kind of audio that plays when you visit a website I feel is tacky. I don’t like surprises, and that counts as a surprise. It’s annoying at any rate.

Bad design

What constitutes a good or bad design is highly subjective, however, there are a few things that will definitely annoy users. Here are some of the worst offenders.

8. Poor choice of colours

Eye-bleeding bright colours or unreadable text makes using your website particularly difficult to read. Make life easy for your readers by giving your colour scheme a contrasting, yet pleasant feel.

9. Poor site navigation

If a visitor cannot find what they are looking for, they will leave. Make it as simple as possible to find different pages on the website, using a sensible menu and navigation layout.

10. Using Frames

Using HTML frames is an old-fashioned and troublesome website technique. They can damage a user’s experience, and additionally can cause havoc with a web browser’s next/previous navigation buttons.

11. Images that are too small

If you have images that contain vital information or that demonstrate your product (or services), then users should be able to zoom in or view a larger version of an image. I’ve seen far too many online shops where the product image is 125px x 125px where you can’t even see the product. How can you convince your customers to buy something if they can’t even see what they are buying?

12. Popup Adverts

Just say no! Popup adverts annoy users and are associated with spyware. Avoid at all costs.

13. No about page

Visitors these days often like to read about a company or a website to get an idea of what the website is all about. The about page is a great way to explain the origins of a business or a website. You can go a little further by having photos of people involve with a company or website. This helps remind visitors that there are real people behind a website, which also helps with trust.

14. No contact page

You want visitors to get in touch, so add a postal address, email contact form, email address, telephone number, etc. Make it as easy as possible for people to contact you. Adding a registered business address adds a degree of trust for online shops too.

15. No calls to action

You want visitors to do something, such as register for an account, buy something, sign up to a newsletter, call you, etc. Therefore tell them! Have strong calls to action to encourage your visitors to do what you want.

16. Over-reliance on Javascript or Flash

Javascript and Flash should only be used on a website to improve the user experience, not to replace basic functionality such as links or site navigation. Additionally, some users disable Javascript or block Flash, so your website should gracefully degrade so that those visitors can still use your website.

17. Visible script errors

Script errors do occur on occasion, however script error messages that are visible to the user do give your visitors a negative impression.

Website content

The information and ‘stuff’ on a website is what you want your visitors to see and engage with. So here are a few common issues relating to the content on websites.

18. Broken links and images

Checking images is pretty quick for a website, as it’s pretty obvious if something is missing. Therefore there is no excuse. Broken links are harder to find, but there are plenty of free tools to help you. The last thing any visitor wants to see is a 404 – Page Not Found message. Check your most important links manually, e.g. Twitter, Newsletter Signups and RSS feed links.

19. Lack of text on the website

Whatever you offer, you need to have some text on your website that describes your product/service/club, etc. Lots of relevant and useful textual content on your website will also help with search engine rankings. This is because potential visitors will type a range of generic and long-tail keyword phrases into search engines to find websites like yours. Lots of useful text-based content increases the chance that potential visitors will find you via the search engines.

20. Sign up before you can read anything

I’ve noticed a few websites now that require you to register before you read anything. Getting a visitor to create an account is a significant request compared to just reading your website. I would never sign up to a website unless I knew what I was going to get, so you should have at least some content on your website that doesn’t require users to create an account first.

21. Advertising – too much or unrelated

Advertising on a website is absolutely fine if done correctly. Beware of having irrelevant adverts on your website, particularly adverts that are known to be annoying or have a bad reputation. Also, don’t plaster your website with adverts, keep it balanced.

22. Avoid animated GIFS

Animated GIFs are so 1990s. Avoid them where possible. They do look tacky, and they can distract your users from looking at the good parts of your website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a very large topic, however, here are a few obvious mistakes that I frequently see on websites I review.

23. Not using the <title> tags correctly

Make sure you use the HTML <title> tags on every page to describe what’s on that page. Don’t keyword stuff, but the title should describe what that page is about. What’s in the <title> tags is very important from an SEO perspective because they have a strong weighting in the rankings. Additionally, if someone bookmarks one of your web pages, it reminds them of what is in that web page.

24. No search engine friendly URLs

Important keywords in your URL structure can help benefit your search engine rankings. Additionally, page titles that appear in URLs give prospective visitors a hint to what the article contains just from the URL alone. e.g. www.mywebsite.com/?p=344 is not descriptive, however, www.mywebsite.com/how-to-grow-your-business is much more descriptive and gives users an idea what to expect if they click on that link.

25. Click HERE links

The text that is used for text links is a small but still an important ranking factor for search engines. Therefore avoid having links that look like “Click here for the download”. Try using something like “Please sign up to download the free business worksheet“. (Please note, those links just go to my home page and are for illustration only).

Your pet hates?

I hope that you found those tips useful. Please let me know what your pet hates are in the comments below!

Thank You

The following people helped me write this article by giving me a few more ideas, so I’d like to say thank you to them all.

• http://www.twitter.com/wonder_lander (Jon Cook)
• http://www.twitter.com/Tintop (John Edwards)
• http://www.twitter.com/Noidontdrinktea (Fee Fee)
• http://www.twitter.com/The_Landlord (The Landlord)
• http://www.twitter.com/chimpdonk (Crispin Read)