Top 10 website flaws

There are numerous mistakes in the world of web design. Why don't we look at these 10 biggest ones!

1. A lot of Advertisements.
When you're trying to generate profits from your website, it's all too easy to overwhelm your site with ads. Put yourself in your user's place and check out your site and ask yourself if the advertising feels intrusive. Does the site seem like an information source or would it feel more like a page-holder for the ads?
Oh great :p

Seriously?

2. Excessive plugins
You have to keep plugin usage to no more than 1 type per site. If you've got Show, then weight loss have a media player, or if you're using Java, then no Flash. Really not as bad to use the same tool twice, however.

3. Flash Intros.
Please, don't use a Flash intro on your website. They've recently been so overused that they're becoming universally mocked.

4. Unclear Layout and Course-plotting.
Some, especially business sites, have problems with some kind of disease where the very simplest task takes 15 steps. If users are asking you how to do something on your site, then you need to improve your design and navigation. If there are particular tasks people want to do frequently, put them on the front site.

5. No Marking for External Links.
There are 2 sorts of links: internal (to other parts of your website) and external (to other websites). For the good thing about your users, it's best if you mark external links, either by making them a unique color or using some sort of a symbol (a box with an arrow is the typical one). It can also good to help make the external links open in new home windows, so people aren't going out of your site altogether when they click them.

6. Unclear Linking.
Some web pages are designed to show links only when people put their mouse button over them. While this might make the design look nicer, it is not very user-friendly. Instead, use an evidently different color for links, and preferably underline them. This kind of makes them more obvious to the user, thus easier to use.

7. Unlabelled Email Links.
Usually plainly mark a hyperlink that will send an email (a mail to link) with the phrase 'email'. If you change clicking a name into send email, you'll upset users who expected to determine more about the person.

8. Broken Links.
You should check your links regularly to make certain that they each still work. There's little or nothing worse than finding a site that looks useful, only to find it hasn't been updated in years, so almost all of the links don't work. Whilst a site does mostly run itself after having a while, that doesn't indicate that you should disregard essential maintenance.

9. Unusual Fonts.
Adhere to the most frequent web fonts: that's pretty much just Arial, Georgia, Tahoma, and Verdana. When you use more obscure fonts, then most users won't be comfortable with them. The only place for non-standard fonts is in your logo or headings, and then only if they are exhibited as an image.

10. Badly-sized Text.
It's important to keep your textual content about the standard size. Producing text too big or too small makes it hard to read and annoying for many users. A good thing you can do is use relative text message sizing (not pixels) that allows the browser to respect the user's preferred text size. You should also consider offering keys on your site to decrease or raise the typeface size.

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