5 Common Website Mistakes
We often encounter mistakes or missing pieces when new clients ask us to improve their websites. Below is a list of some of the common one's we've observed:
1. No website analytics.
This is one of the most important things you can add to your website yet surprisingly it is often overlooked. With free analytics packages available such as Google Analytics there's really no reason to not have stats on your website. If it's important for you to know who your audience is, where they came from, and what they're looking at, then you really should have analytics on your website.
2. Splash pages / intro pages.
There's nothing more annoying than being forced to sit through a loading animation before you can interact with a website. Flash is a great compliment to a website but it should not be used for the entire site. Instead, use Flash to do things that you cannot or should not do in HTML such as playing an animation to demonstrating a product or service.
3. Embedding important text inside images.
Unless you've got some good reason to hide text from search engines you really shouldn't be embedding text in images. Text embedded within an image cannot be read by search engines and people with disabilities will not be able to read the text using a screen reader. If you MUST embed text within an image, be sure to summarize the text within your image's alt attribute.
4. "Clever" website navigation
Your navigation should be clear and easy to follow. If you've got a section that contains company information, call it something intuitive like "company" or "about". Don't make your user roll over or click anything to discover what's behind it.
5. Poor use of unique title tags
Title tags (<title>) are generally regarded as one of the most important metrics for achieving higher SEO rankings but so many sites either don't use them or use the same text for every page. Here are some key attributes to consider when writing a good title:
- Use keywords that are relevant to the current web page and your target audience
- Include your brand at the beginning or end of each title tag
- Limit your characters to 65 or less (including spaces)
Example: Award Winning Marketing & Design | Designworks
5 of Our Favorite Website UI Plug-Ins
We’ve compiled a list of our favorite 5 most commonly used website user interface plug-ins. These plug-ins offer easy solutions to enable more user-friendly functionality on your website.
jQuery Accordion
The jQuery Accordion is a great way to organize content on a webpage; especially if you have a lot of content that needs to fit within a limited space. Once you’ve installed the jQuery Javascript library, setting up the accordion is a breeze.
jQuery Accordion
View more at: http://jqueryui.com/demos/accordion/
jQuery Tabs
jQuery Tabs are another space-saving UI component built upon the jQuery library. As with the jQuery Accordions, you can use your own CSS to customize the tabs.
jQuery Tabs
View the demos at: http://jqueryui.com/demos/tabs/
Lightwindow
Lightwindow from www.stickmanlabs.com is an extremely versatile modal window plug-in. In addition to standard modal window features such as galleries and custom HTML, Lightwindow allows you to directly load a Flash SWF overlay on top of your current page. This saves a lot of coding time because you don’t need to write all the object/embed code and you don’t need to create an extra HTML page to in order to contain the SWF. Lightwindow is also a great way to add content to a page when the content is too big to fit within your page template.
See more at: http://www.stickmanlabs.com/lightwindow/
Galleria
Galleria is a jQuery-based Javascript gallery that makes it easy to add an image gallery to your website. It provides a number of customization options and there is a lightweight (minified) version in order to keep page load times to a minimum.
Galleria - Javascript Image Gallery
Check it out at: http://devkick.com/lab/galleria/
AddThis
AddThis is an extremely easy way to add social bookmarking capabilities to your website. Simply go to the AddThis website, choose the button you want to use and output the code. Once you copy the code into your website you’re in business.
AddThis Social Bookmarking Plug-in
Get started with AddThis at: http://www.addthis.com