Wow! Thanks alot this really helped me notice alot of things with my site, and i thank you, im improving it right now and i really never would have noticed any of it without read this post so i thank you a ton

Oh yes, I actually found a copy of some of my first pages (from Angelfire pagebuilder *shudder*) and boy were they TACKY! One thing that I felt would be good to mention is that if you're going to use backgrounds, keep the same one for the entire site if at all possible. That was one thing I remember that I had done on my first site is have different backgrounds on practically every page since angelfire had this big background gallery that was kinda cool. That, and keep the text to a managable size. We don't need pages full of text
THIS BIG
ya know?

You've given EXCELLENT advice here! Great job!

Even though I don't sell anything or whatever on my site (it's just where I go to post my rants and such), I still try to keep it as simple as possible. That's mainly for my benefit so I don't have to spend half an hour trying to figure out where I'm supposed to put new stuff and all that good stuff. But it also helps anyone who actually visits my site (yeah, right - like I have visitors, hehe).


P.S. I particularly liked your advice about changing (un)visited link colors. Most browsers do it by default, but some users change settings and don't remember how to get them back. And besides which, I don't like purple that much anyway (default VLINK color) anyway. *grins*

Not bad. I personally don't make those mistakes, even though I'm a newbie at html. Here are my tips:

-Can't afford a .com, .net, .uk or whatever domain? Try .tk or .co.nr - their absolutely free.

-If you use frames, I don't recommend making them re-sizable. Me and my friends find it annoying and unprofessional.

-Keep it simple. At first, don't make your design over complicated. Don't use animations or bright and dazzling colors. Make your page focus on the content, not the design.

Those are good suggestions. Some other things I've noticed on pages that are really annoying include sites where the style of the pages/navigation menus changes a lot from page to page and where people overuse animated GIFs/Flash/blinking text/Javascript/etc. Just because it's cool and you can use it doesn't necessarily mean you should use it.

One of the biggest mistakes are FLASH INTROS I think. The site visitors will hate it to click the "Skip Intro"-Button every time they visit your site. So even worse is a Flash Intro without the Skip Intro-Button!

For me personally Flash itself is a mistake. There are internet users without Flash Plug-in, and others like me who simply turn Flash off because they don't like it. And blind people can't "see" what's going on in a flash movie.

GrettingZ

Next time, please type a bit more than 2 short sentences when you copy entire articles. I have reduced credits for this one, solely because YOU didn't contribute, you just copied from other sites. You didn't even comment on what you quoted.

Now onto the actual topic

First, color choices. I can not stress this enough, I have seen websites with bright red text on bright blue background. It instantly gave me a killer migraine. So choose your color scheme wisely. Personally I use http://www.colorschemer.com - yep people I paid for a color schemer program, it helped me tremendously and saved me a lot of time of testing colors.

Secondly, I can't begin to count the times where I found people completely amazed by the fact that if you use a font called "I_like_fonts" on your site for let's say the entire site, that people without that font installed can't see the site as you intended. Actually skip using special fonts all together, use font families declared in CSS and stick with the standard ones. That way you can be sure that all systems will see the font as intended (Win, linux and mac)

Also, I have seen several sites that use a solid color image as background, just using the hex code as background color will save a lot of bandwidth. Personally, I do use background images, but I keep them very small and tileable, they only have to downloaded once and that's it, so it's still fast. (am talking about 5kb max as size here)

I think that's enough rant for now

Useful Tips. Especially that e-mail one. Thnx bro....hmm Nice site

First of all, I'm glad that this post exists. It is *very* helpful and useful information that point out things that people may or may not notice. ^_^ I, myself, found the advice useful and plan to use them myself -- if I haven't already. ^_^



This is a really good advice -- as the website designer would *want* their site to look the same on all browsers; however... it's not entirely possible. Each browser company (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, etc.) render their browsers differently -- for many reasons, one being competition.

Each of the companies want people to use *their* browser so they try to make theirs different (however little) from other browsers, so that they have the edge, so that they can have the upper hand over another browser company. Because of this, a webpage will look different on every browser -- even if it's only a little bit of change here or there.

I am not, however, trying to discourage you from taking this advice (though it sounds like it, I know. -.-;;). I just want you guys to know this fact so that you might not get frustrated when the webpage opened in IE isn't the same as when it is opened in Firefox. Haha... been there, done that, and I was annoyed as hell. But, even as I know that now, I still try my best to make the webpage appear as how I want it to in different browsers.

Hm... if you actually want, and I think this is a better way as well... what you can do is still try to make your site look similar on different browsers, but should also label a "Website best viewed with [insert browser name here]" message on the homepage (or the initial, "Enter" page) of your site. This way, the user can either choose to continue viewing the site in the browser they are still currently using or, if they aren't already using it, change to the browser of the recommended one.

Another tip I have that in improving your website is to not have a horizontal scrolling bar -- especially when you don't have a vertical one. I would say the majority of sites (and whoo! that's a *lot* of sites) use vertical scroll bars and many, many people are accustomed to those. If you would like to use a horizontal scroll bar, this is okay (but not entirely recommended) as long as the user does not have to scroll much using that scroll bar. And even then, it rather throws the flow of your site out the window, because even if the site has both a vertical and horizontal scroll bar, no matter which scroll bar is the main one (the one you'd use to scroll the most in order to view the detailed contents on the site), it can be annoying to have to work with both scrolls in order to be able to view everything (or even just one thing) on a site.

Another reason is not to use a horizontal scroll bar is readability. Once again, people are more accustomed to reading/browsing through a side that operations up and down in order to view contents, as opposed to left and right.

Hope this helps!

-- scryoko

This is really very good helpful tutorial for me and for my site.


The tutorial here are not very hard to grasp, i only need some care towards these mistakes. I have also make some of these mistakes, and i think i'm gonna take more care about it in futur..


in other words, i will have to re-design the site.. lol