We’ve all seen the sites that make you think “Uh oh, amateur hour”. It’s easy for beginners to make some basic mistakes that give their sites an amateurish look. So how do you avoid giving that impression with your first website? Here are 20 tips to help you.

1. Look at lots of good and bad sites. Try to list what makes them look good or bad.

2. Keep your pages simple. Look at the way good magazines layout their pages.

3. Do not use a vivid colour or frantic pattern for a background. Most people will find it hard to look at any pictures or read text if the background is too distracting.

4. If you don’t want a plain white background, make sure that your text is still readable. A dark or medium blue background with black text will make what you write illegible and nobody is interested enough to strain their eyes – there are plenty more websites out there that they can read.

5. A black background can work but you must make sure your text is white or another very light colour. It is probably best not used for pages where you are trying to give people quite a lot of information.

6. If you use a graphic for a web page background, make sure it is pale and text is readable on it. You must also check your page with different monitor resolutions because it might not work well in a different resolution to the one you use.

7. Don’t go crazy with fonts. Choose ONE easily readable font like Verdana, for example, and use it throughout the site. You could use a more decorative font for headings if you feel you absolutely must.

8. Don’t use lots of big pictures on one page. It will take longer for that page to load and people won’t wait around for slow loading pages.

9. Make sure that any pictures you do use are relevant to the subject of the page and add something to it.

10. Make sure that all pictures are reduced in file size.

11. Learn how to wrap text around pictures and other graphics, long pages with large empty areas alongside graphics just scream amateur.

12. Don’t put your text in a graphic. If you do, it will probably slow down page loading and it will also mean search engines won’t be able to read it so won’t index your page.

13. Try to avoid frames unless you have a good reason to use them and you understand them. They can sometimes hinder rather than help navigation, stop people linking to individual pages on your site and can stop search engines indexing your site.

14. Make sure your menus are consistent throughout your site and make sure that all your pages are accessible from your menu. It’s surprising how easy it is to forget to add a new page to it.

15. Don’t try innovative ideas with your menu. Stick to tried and tested ways of displaying it. If people can’t find your menu or work out how to use it, they won’t stay on your site for long.

16. Never, I repeat, never put ‘under construction’ signs on your website. Nothing screams ‘amateur hour’ louder than this. When people do this, what do they expect? Are they expecting people to come back periodically to see if it’s finished? If they are expecting that, then they are fooling themselves. Don’t do it.

17. Don’t put lots of little icons from various companies dotted around your pages unless you are getting paid to do so. Leave off things like ‘this site was designed to be viewed in Internet Explorer’. Why do you want to give free publicity to Microsoft – do you think Bill Gates can’t afford advertising? Even if you are getting paid or expect to get commission from affiliate advertising, make sure the ads look good on the page and aren’t annoying. Some flashing ads can actually send people off a site in double quick time no matter how fascinating the content.

18. Don’t use a web counter, they really don’t give you any useful information and experienced web users know that. Instead use something like sitemeter.com which has a free package giving you useful information about your visitors like their location, the referring website, top entry and exit pages, etc. Although you have to display a small sitemeter graphic if you use their free package, you can choose a very small one that doesn’t display the numbers if you don’t want visitors to see them.

19. Check and double check your text. Poor spelling and punctuation look bad and, in the worst cases, make an article hard to understand. Remember the best selling book, ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves’. The title comes from a story about a panda that eats shoots and leaves but a wrongly placed comma changes the sense, ie ‘the panda eats, shoots and leaves’. You should know the difference between it’s and its, their and there and that separate is not spelled seperate – a misspelling I see all over the web. Also, please don’t go mad using exclamations marks – one occasionally is OK, if you must, but not at the end of every other sentence and certainly not several at the end of any sentence.

20. Don’t expect a website about you, your family and pets to become a cult attraction. Only your friends and family will want to visit it and maybe not all of them. If you want to do a website, choose a subject that is likely to interest a variety of people even if it’s a minority interest like bungee jumping, camel racing or tiddlywinks then make it the best website on the subject that you possibly can.

Whether your website is for your business, to give information on a subject you love or just because you want your own website, it is very disappointing if it doesn’t get an audience so it’s worth taking the trouble to get presentation and content right.

Pictures
Many beginners don’t understand the difference between the size pictures appear on a webpage and their file size. Always remember that a digital picture is computer file, usually a .jpg so, to reduce the picture, you must reduce the file size. To do this, you need to use a graphics editor, Google Picasa is a good free option.

The reason that this is important is because a big jpg file will take a long time to load on a webpage and most people will not wait. They will become impatient and click away on to another site that loads quickly.

Similarly, if you put too many pictures on a webpage, it will take too long to load. How many is too many? It depends on the file sizes of your pictures. If you feel a need to use several pictures, you could convert them to thumbnails with a larger picture opening in a separate window when somebody clicks on one of them.

Text
Most people find it more of a strain to read text on a computer monitor than on paper. This is something that anybody who writes webpages must consider. Visitors might not read a long essay, even on the most fascinating of topic, simply because it’s not a good way to present information online. If your topic demands this kind of format, consider giving a ‘print’ option so that visitors can print off the article without all the surrounding ads and banners if you have them. There are also ways of breaking up text to make it easier to read on a screen.

• Use short paragraphs
• Use sub titles where possible so people can find particular information quickly.
• Use bullet points

Don’t make pages too long, people don’t like scrolling down too far unless the page is particularly fascinating. Split a very long page into two or even three pages but make sure you split on natural breaks.

Spot the Spelling Mistake!

Spelling and Grammar
How many times have you looked at a website and seen spelling and grammar mistakes? My guess would be that you have seen this many times.

If you want your site to be taken seriously, you must check for errors. When people see mistakes like these, it can raise doubts in their minds about just how much faith they can put in any information on the site.

Almost everybody has Word, Word Perfect or similar programs with spelling and grammar checkers. Just paste your text in one of these, if you have written it elsewhere, and run it through the checker.

Layout and Design
The way you layout and design your webpage can have an impact on whether visitors read the information on it and whether they go on to other pages on the site.

• People are accustomed to finding menus in the top left of a page or along the top. Don’t decide to be innovative and put it in the bottom right corner of your page or other unlikely position because many people will never notice it and certainly won’t look for it there.
• Don’t put links to other pages on your site in a way that makes them hard to find. For example, nobody is going to spend time hovering their mouse over words or images that might possibly contain a link. Make links obvious.
• If you have a three column layout like this page, don’t write a very short article and then put so many ads in the side columns that they go way below the centre column content. Trust me, nobody will scroll down to look at ads. It looks ugly and amateurish. It shows that you haven’t considered how people use the web.

Flash, Fireworks and Other Technical Effects
Personally, my heart sinks when I’m looking for information and visit a website with a Flash opening page. It’s even worse when I don’t have the option of bypassing it. Then, when I find that the whole site is done in Flash or uses other technical effects to present information leaving me to watch what appears to be little more than a slide show, I quickly decide I’ll find the information elsewhere.

If you must use technical effects, make sure they are appropriate to the presentation of your subject matter and that people can opt out of them and see the plain vanilla version. Not everybody is on a fast, broadband connection or using a fast computer with plenty of memory. If your site causes their computers to freeze, I promise, they will never come back to your website nor recommend it.

The Final Check
When you build your webpages, as you load each one on to your site, check them online. Read the text looking for mistakes. If you aren’t good at spotting them, get somebody else to check too.

Ask yourself if the page looks as good online as it did on your computer. If the answer is no, then fix it. Your webpages could be online for years so it’s worth taking the time to get them right.

Check all your links. Personally, I never type in a link, I always copy and paste but, even so, I always check them by clicking on them. Links that don’t work are annoying for visitors and give a bad impression.