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CHAPTER 20 Traps to avoid
Top five things to avoid
1)
Screen Width!
The formerly self-imposed 640x400 window width was the standard
of page design. After six months of watching logs, and checking major hit count
sites, less than 10% of users now report a window that size. Certain browsers
(IE) will report their screen size to the server when it connects to a web site.
640x400 (actually about 600x350 to account for browser scroll margins/title and
address bar), is still doable with good page design. A major mistake is hard coding
a site for 800x600 or higher pixels - be flexible, and allow your text to flow
around graphics.
By
using tables you can get the flexibility to make your page appear well on any
size screen resolution. A good table design is one that uses Percentages instead
of fixed widths. That way, a screen will look good from 640x400 all the way up
to 1600x1200.
If you have two or three columns on your site, set your table
widths to each percentage, and let the browser work out the display. While testing,
make sure to reset your screen width a few times and reboot to make sure your
display is accurate in several different browsers and widths.
I
will freely admit that there are certain page setups that are extremely difficult
to get to flow right under different browsers.
2)
No Java!
Notice that
not a single major search engine or large commercial site on the internet uses
Java. Why? It is too slow loading on most peoples systems. Even Wired Digital
took it off their site.
High bandwidth Java, Real Audio, or shockwave style plug-in's are out. Big time out (except specialty sites that can survive BECAUSE of the added content). Users that surf for information or products don't want to be distracted by site overhead.
3) No Flashing!
Nothing drives users away, never to return, like flashing text, or abuse
of animated gifs can. That scrolling banner text ranks right up their too.
4)
Ban Those Banner Exchanges!
Link Exchange is the great modern Internet
myth of our time. I've talked to hundreds of people in-the-know about this subject,
and the facts are simple - banner exchanges cost you repeat visitors in the short
run, the medium run, and the long run. It's like putting a DO NOT ENTER sign with
a big skull and crossbones on your front door.
5)
Don't Abuse Images!
I recently had someone ask me why their site couldn't
get indexed on the search engines. I wasn't surprised when I looked at their site
- 41 pages of pure images only - not a shred of text on the site. That is the
worst case scenario of course, but you should keep pages under 64k (max) total
graphics and text. Anything else, you're losing your search engine food, and the
load time is driving away users before the page ever loads.