Horrors of bad web design

Taken from an article entitled March Madness and the Top Horrors of Bad Web Design on Paperstreet.com I will highlight a few of these faux pas.

Bad Flash
Long Flash introductions irritate almost everybody, because they are time-consuming and have no purpose other than to show off some computer geek's new skills. Just because you can do something does not mean you should. Ask a simple question when designing the site - "How will this help my client?".

Letting your nephew design the website
Everyone has a pimply computer-whiz nephew. Would you let him put together your marketing brochure or let them meet clients? No, of course not. A few courses in C++ or Java do not qualify him to design your firm's website.

Text as graphics
Graphics take a long time to load and they cannot be indexed by search engines. Thus, your website will not be seen by any search engines and visitors will think your website is slow, as is your firm.

Spelling errors and bad grammar
The bane of every website and also an indication of the level of care which has gone into the site's development. Such basics can get lost in the technical wizardry, and yet are the simplest most glaring errors to fix.

Old templates
Microsoft Front Page comes with free templates to use on your website. Of course, you get what you pay for. What you get is a circa 1995 design.

Clueless navigation
Sites with a lot of pictures and no navigation text are particularly maddening. Having to scroll over all the pictures to see what they say is clueless navigation. By the time you have done this you have forgotten the title of the very first picture.

Caveats
This site can only be viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0, Flash 5.0+ enabled, on a 1024 px by 768 px monitor that has a refresh rate of 75mhz, 2.0 Pentium 4 processor, 256mb RAM, and 50GB hard drive, etc., etc.
The last time we checked, a website was NOT a piece of software you buy at Incredible Connection. All websites should be cross-platform/browser compliant.

Broken links
Very infuriating, every web design program has a feature that checks for broken links. This should be used often.

Colours
Rainbow colors are not meant for the web. Black backgrounds are meant for computer geeks' web pages. Flashing colored text is meant for used car sites. Please, before we go blind, use colors that are professional.

Other horrors mentioned in this article include: bad graphics, pop up or pop under windows, no contact information and awful music.

Article on paperstreet.com