Make Money Online

Top 10 Mistakes of Web Building

Building websites are not easy if you are new. There are just so many possibilities in designing, developing and coding a website that sometimes, things just go wrong. In here are a list of the most common or serious mistakes webmasters make. In fact, I have seen some big corporate websites doing these. And now, for my list of the Top 10 Mistakes...

1. Images for Text

Text are boring, with limited fonts and colours. In designing a website, people often can't help but use images for text. This is normal. Look at this website itself, I have the words Make Money Online represented in graphics on the right side.

However, people can go way overboard with using images. They use images to represent headings, navigations, page titles and etc. Now this is bad, very bad. Search engines like Google and Yahoo send spiders (or bots) to webpages to read their content and index it into their database. This is so that users like you and me can search for websites using these search engines.

But...there is one problem. These bots cannot read images! So a bot coming to my website will not know that there is the words Make Money Online on the right side of my website (not that I mind).

When using excessive images instead of normal text for your website, you risk having little spiderable content left for search engines. This can affect your ranking in search engines.

2. Using Iframes or Frames

Iframes or frames are simply the combination of several webpages into one. The user may see the complete work, but search engines don't. In fact, search engines will see these frames as individual webpages. This is fatal when webmasters place all the navigation links in frames.

You will end up having webpages that are not interlinked to each other. This will cause webpages not being spidered as the bots cannot link from 1 webpage to the other. The PageRank is also not distributed out to your own webpages. Read more on PageRank distribution here.

3. No proper Navigation Menu

Bad navigation can drive your visitors away when they can't find a webpage they want. Some websites do not even have a navigation menu, placing links all over the webpages. Another mistake is that the webpages are not linked in a orderly system. This is caused when a website has no actual sectioning.

Always split your website to smaller sections and have links pointing to them at all webpages. This allows visitors to switch between sections of your website covering different subjects. For example, take a look at this website. It has 5 main section that is always linked to at the top of the page. The 5 main sections are further divided to webpages that are linked to from the left navigation menu.

4. Long scrolling pages

Overwhelming your visitors with information is not a good thing. Some websites have so many stuff chucked into the homepage that it looks spammy and unprofessional. The loading times are longer too, an annoyance to visitors. Remember, it takes, on average, a few seconds for a visitor to click the 'Back' button when they visit a website that doesn't impress them. So making your homepage spam-like doesn't helps a lot.

Cut your webpage short with around 400-800 words each. Divide out the huge content into smaller webpages and have them link to each other if neccessary.

5. URL Cloaking or Shortening

These url shortening techniques might help your visitor to remember your shorter url, but is actually a blackhat SEO technique frown on by Google. You may get your website banned by Google for cloaking your URL. Either use a easy to remember domain name right from the start or start your website at a new domain name. You can use 301 redirects to direct the extisting traffic back to your new domain.

6. Javascript generated content

Similiar to images, search engines cannot read content generated by JavaScript. You can use Javascript for applications such as forms and guestbooks. Other than that, the use of Javascript should be restricted. If possible, use PHP or any other server side scripting as the content generated can be read by search engines.

7. Excessive Advertisements, Pop-ups

Earning money online is fine, but spamming your website with advertisements and pop-ups are not. Especially when your advertisements are those flashy banners. It is generally agreed that text advertisements receive higher clicks than image advertisements for most websites.

Even if you need to use banners, restrict them to at most 2 per webpage. And please, no pop-ups.

8. Colourful backgrounds & Bright text

These speak of bad design, bad taste and bad website. Choose a background image that is not so colourful, else the text on it will be unreadable. Usually, having a solid colour as a background can be good enough if you know how to design your website. Either way, a plain looking website is better than a colourful one that is unreadable.

Make sure your text is easy to read. It is annoying to see text against a colourful background, or text colours that are too similar to the background. Choose your colours well, you have to know about contrasting and complementing colours if you want to design a website. Use this free online tool AccessColor to check if your website colours are contrasted well enough.

9. Design Consistency

Alway use the same template/design throughout your website. It is distracting to the visitor if your layout is inconsistant as they cannot find what they want easily. For example, on 1 webpage, your navigation links are placed at the top. On another webpage, it goes to the left. Visitors expect to see consistency in a website so give it to them.

10. Flash Websites

Flash websites are good, they have niffy animations, interactive website and such. However, search engines cannot read Flash websites (urgh, not again!). What this means is that your website is unlikely to rank high for any keywords. If you insist on having a Flash website, have a HTML version avaliable as well and make sure you update it as regularly as the Flash version.