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A. Unless you have some particular motive
in mind, don't make a "downer" site. Be positive.
 Use bright,
contrasting (not necessarily gaudy), perhaps unsettling colors to
wakeup your
visitor.
Your site should be energizing, not a place that someone should
feel comfortable
and relaxed
in.
B. Don't try to dazzle your visitor
with your command of the English language. Use simple
words
that everyone can understand or you run the risk that everyone will
not understand
anything
at all.
C. Don't talk down to your visitor or
make them feel stupid or small either. Remember, they
can click
off your site as easy as they clicked onto your site.
D. Don't offend anyone. Remember, when
you publish your website, you instantly become
an international
company. You will make your visitors feel much better about dealing
with
you if
you use positive language about them along with your own site and
company rather
than negative
words about the competition.
E. Things that don't work. Links that
don't link, special effects that don't always work, etc.
Visitors
are going to catch every mistake on your site. If more than one
or two items do
not work,
they will start to wonder if your products or services work any
better.
F. Do not try to use common symbols
and highlighting for other uses. For example, PCs
commonly
use blue underlined text as hyperlinks. Do not use either for highlighting.
If you
use either
as highlighting, visitors will attempt to click on it. Before they
read the sentence
to discover
it is just highlighting, they will think your page does not work
correctly and will
go elsewhere
to a site that does work.
G. Don't use anything that looks like
a button image as highlighting or part of your graphics!
If it
looks like it might be something that a user will confuse with a
button, then make sure
it is
a button that does something! Using images that look like common
selectable buttons
will only
serve to add confusion and irritation to the viewer.
H. Do not use pictures or text in background
combinations that make it difficult to view.
Example:
yellow text on almost anything but a black or blue background is
impossible to
read.
Even on a black background, many monitors can not resolve the yellow
from the
black.
Do not make it a contest just to read your page.
I. Avoid using extremely small type.
While some people still use 640 x 480, many are now
using
higher resolutions of 1024 x 768 or even 1280 x 1024! This makes
text that was
small
at 640 x 480, into microscopic text at 1280 x 1024. The visitor
is not doing
something
wrong by using high resolution, nor is it his responsibility to
ensure the
readability
of your page! Be realistic, technology is moving forward, not backwards.
A
good design
compromise seems to be targeted towards the 800 x 600 viewer minus
50
pixels
for the slider bar.
J. DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT play any tricks
to keep a visitor locked into your website.
Some web
designers attempt to put in code that prevents a visitor from leaving
their site.
This is
a terrific way to really anger a visitor. DO NOT do other tricks
like making your
home page
the visitor's home page or adding your page to their favorites list.
Nothing
makes
a visitor madder than someone who is not authorized or invited to
make changes
to their
computer.
K. Collecting statistical data about
the people using your website is a great idea, especially if
the reader
does not have to take special steps just to satisfy your desire
to extract
information
from them. DO NOT MAKE THE VISITOR WORK
TO GET TO YOUR
INFORMAITON!
The visitor should not have to pay a price to get to your stuff.
Whatever
the price
(even if you think it is minimal), IT IS
TOO HIGH for most visitors! Some Web
Pages
make a visitor fill out an information form to get in. Even worse,
some companies
go to
great pains providing a tremendous amount of useful information
on their web
pages,
then ask users to sign in with an assigned user name and password.
There are
millions
of web pages online today, can you remember millions of login names
and
passwords?
THEN DON'T MAKE YOUR VISITOR DO IT EITHER ! (You don't ask for a
history
to let
potential customers read your magazine ad, so don't do it on your
web page either.)
If a customer
is nice enough to take the time to tell you about him/herself, great.
But you
have to
decide which is more important to you regarding avisitor: using
force to extract
some background
data, or an order for your product (or at least some additional
contact
regarding
your products/services)?
© 2001 - Barry
Wroobel - Discovery Data Systems, inc.
(note: Set left and right printer margins
to 0.25" for printing)
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