Things to Avoid When Developing Your Website

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As a web development firm, we are often approached by clients with things that they are wanting on their website. They want a large image in the middle, with music playing in the background with a yellow, red, and pink color scheme. They want pop up advertising on every page to “catch customer’s attention.” If customer’s are dead set on this, then we will kindly turn them away. Quite frankly, we don’t want our name being associated with a website that is looked upon as an annoyance.

There are a handful of issues to avoid when developing your website, and we are going to cover some of them here:

Background Music
Believe it or not, not everyone likes your choice of music. This also can contribute to slow load times. This is a big no-no, especially if there is no stop or pause ability.

Pop-ups
No, they don’t grab your customer’s attention. In fact, web surfers can’t close them soon enough and will just immediately leave your site. They may even worry that your site has infected them with spyware. Besides, many pop-up ads are now blocked automatically via their browser or pop up blocking software.

Large Graphics/Images
These image files usually take up a lot of space, and cause slow load times. It is suggested that you break up this image into several smaller images. If you have Photoshop, try the slicing feature.

Frames
There is not a bigger sign of an old web page than one that utilizes frames. These are no longer an acceptable format for your site. Bookmarking/Printing becomes impossible. Not only that, but pages found on the web containing frames, will not contain any navigational features as those are apart of another frame.

Horizontally/Vertically Scrolling Pages
Research has shown that visitors that need to scroll to see your page’s information typically will not view more than what is on display. Avoid long scrolling pages, and break them up into different links if need be.

Unruly Backgrounds
Nice backgrounds may make you stand out, but for all the wrong reasons. You do not want your background overtaking your actual web page.

Poor Navigation
If visitors cannot find the information they are looking for, they will go to another web site to find this information. Make everything clearly defined and easy to find.

Appropriate Color Scheme
I know red, yello, and purple are colors of the rainbow, but that doesn’t mean they will look good on your web page. You need to stick to a color scheme. There are plenty of web sites out there to get ideas from and even tools available to help you choose color schemes.

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