Your visitors have about 5 seconds to decide if they like your website or not, if they get a sense of professionalism, trust and so forth.

The most common website mistakes are easy to prevent or fix.

• Make sure each page in your website has something valuable to offer to your visitors but also the search engine bots.
• Don’t distract your visitors with blinking or scrolling text, animated images, or auto-loading sound. If you are using Flash, understand that it is on its way out and at some point in the future the Flash animation might stop working all together.
• Don’t annoy your visitors with pop-up windows unless it is part of a contact form which your visitor intentionally clicked on.
• Don’t use image backgrounds unless it is done strategically. Instead use background image with coded text.
• Put some thought into organization. Ask for someone to be candid with the way your website is laid out.
• Minimize clicking! Get your visitor to where they need to be as quickly as possible.
• Limit page length to 2 screenfuls, or 6-7 screenfuls for articles. Use pagination if you have to.
• Include a way to get back to the home page, on every page as well as a way to contact you.
• Include a menu on every page. Do not try to be so creative that the visitors cannot navigate your website.
• Don’t use frames for coding.
• Don’t let flashy multimedia ruin your site. Less is more.
• No line of text should be more than about 600 pixels wide unless it is a title.
• Don’t make your page too wide. Standards have changed. You can now have a site with a 1,000 to 1,200 pixel-width.
• Use contrasting colors or simple backgrounds to make your text easy to read. Increase the line spacing (leading) to improve readability.
• Make the text large enough to read.
• Don’t type more than a few words in ALL CAPS.
• Never use more than one exclamation point!
• Use a spell check. Review your copy writing from time to time… there is always something we miss.
• Don’t underline words if they are not links. It is confusing to the visitors.
• Make links in color or underlined, or both.
• Explain what you are linking to by providing title tags.
• Don’t open internal links in a new window. This action is meant for external URL or PDF documents.
• Use descriptive link text.
• Put your contact info, or a link to it, on the top and/or bottom of every page.
• Don’t steal content. Please.
• Don’t hotlink to other sites’ images. They will stop working at some point. It is bad all around
• Don’t ask for “permission” to link to a site.
• Don’t ask to exchange links with other sites.
• Make your website responsive to mobile devices. This is 2013 for goodness sake. 60% of people use a mobile device (don’t fight it).

Call us today for a website consultation: (707) 794-9999 PST.