What is your biggest pet-peeve when you visit a website? Mine… Music that auto plays. Although this drives me nuts, the consensus is that this is not bad enough to make the top 10. So what are the top ten mistakes that WebPages can make? Below is a conglomeration of the web developing community’s opinion on the matter, in no particular order.

• Slow load. Whether it is due to poor design or bloated tables, images, etc slow loading pages will make your bounce rate closer to 100%. No one wants to wait 1-2 min while your cool graphic loads to read the information they want.
  
•  Landing pages. There is nothing worse than being greeted by a message “please wait” while a flash intro loads. A user is looking for content not a flashy video telling how great your site is. Further, this landing page does nothing for your SEO efforts having no crawlable content.
  
•  Wall of text. Users don’t want to read your latest novel. They are looking for information and they want it quick. Make text easily scannable, and break subsections with headers to allow the user to find the information they need.
  
• No Contact Info. So… whose site is this? If you want to lose business or drive it away leave a phone number/ address/ email off of every page.  The drive of any commercial site should be CONTACT US, but with no contact info… yeah.
  
• Busyness. So where is the content? I only see the 5 flashy ads, but no information... Almost as deadly as the wall of text is the busyness of a page. If the pages are not consistently clean and direct the user to the content they need an overhaul.
  
•  Alternate content. Whether a PDF, video, etc, loading alternate content breaks the flow of the user’s navigation. A rule that I always design with is “If it can be text, it should be”.
  
• Readability. White text is OK, but not on a light blue background.  There are uses for 6 and 8 point font, but not as content text.  If you have trouble reading the text, what makes you think that a user will be able to read it, or want to?
  
• Over Advertising. What is the site about, the ads or your content? In most cases, ads are ok, but should be limited to as few as possible and should be outside of the main content so that it does not interrupt the user’s search for content.
   
• Over use of new technologies. This has been the downfall of flash sites, too much use and not well done. JavaScript can also get there. As a general rule don’t use something other than HTML or CSS to do what they can do by themselves.
  
• Uninformative information. Blah, blah, blah… Does your site say a lot and nothing at the same time? Websites are supposed to answer questions for clients. If you have pricing use it, if you have special cases tell them about it. In general don’t leave your potential customer guessing and going somewhere else.

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SEO… SE-shmo … what is all the hype about, I have a website that’s enough for me. WRONG! Unless you only want people that can remember your website address you need to do at least some basic SEO. Some of the easy things that you can do include keywords, and meta-data.  So, what is SEO anyway? Search Engine Optimization is the process of making changes to your website to make them show up better on search engines. There are two main camps of SEO “black hat” and “white hat” and everything in between. Black-hatters use deceptive means to try to rank higher like having a webpage specifically written for spiders that is completely different than any user will see. White-hatters on the other hand use common practices and common sense in tandem to improve your site’s content and keywords so that the users can find the information that they are looking for. In general the Big three (Google, Yahoo, Bing/MSN) frown on making changes just to improve your ranking on the search engine without improving the user’s ability to find what they are looking for. This point is actually one of the main reasons that Google is changing their algorithm. In short, if it doesn’t allow a potential customer/user to find the information that they request then don’t do it!

At Next Step Computers we run a custom program over your site to determine a score based on best practices. For example, does your site have keywords listed in the meta-tags that are actually on the page itself? Just because you shove a bunch of words in the meta-tags, doesn’t make them KEYwords in the eye of search engines. There are also many free tools available that will tell you bits and pieces of the information that you need to accomplish a good SEO. One of the best tools comes from Google, Google Webmaster Tools.  There are many others, but through Google you can access a community that will help you with questions, the tools will give you information on true keyword usage on your site, etc.

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