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50 sins of your website

Posted on July 8, 2010

I don’t know you. What I know is that you’re making mistakes when building a website. In the last years I saw a lot of websites with problems and I was thinking that will be helpful for any of you, no matter how experienced you are, this list of most common mistakes (I still have a lot of these, too…) in building a website.

I am not pretending that this is all you can find. I am pretty sure there are other 1000 problems good to be listed here and discussed so if is something bothering you just spit it out for the sake of having a good conversation and to clarify a bit the way we have to do web developing.

Also I didn’t get into too many samples and explanations because the primarily roll of this blog post is just to present a list of situations which can bring disadvantages to your website. Still if you’re unclear about one of these points drop a comment line and I will clarify it for you.

Thanks for reading and I just hope you have a great time on kensfi.com :)
Also stay close as I will launch in the next days a new blog about SEO and Web Usability ;)

Coding mistakes:

  1. using inline style
  2. you’re still using tables
  3. website is not working in IE6
  4. you don’t used CSS sprites
  5. invalid markup HTML / CSS code
  6. you don’t use external CSS files
  7. no minify JavaScript and CSS
  8. you use the import method for CSS – @import “style.css”; – slow method.
  9. you don’t document your code (no comments especially into the JavaScript / PHP code)
  10. unorganized code, not clean code
  11. unoptimized images
  12. JavaScript is into the head and not before the closing body tag
  13. over-sized files – a maximum of 200-300KB per document will be acceptable
  14. too much JavaScript

    15. SEO mistakes:

  15. your website is entirely dynamically generated
  16. too many images / graphics elements – less text – write at least 500 words for a page
  17. old content, very rare content updates, static website
  18. content fails copyscape – duplicate content
  19. you write for spiders and boots and not for people – too much SEO
  20. repeated keywords all over the page – spammy like
  21. you have redirects
  22. no search-able keywords on the page – the text is not using keywords / key-phrases that might be searched by users
  23. too general keywords – too wide – e.g. “Jewelery” instead of “Toronto Jewelery Store”
  24. too narrow keywords – e.g. “Toyota Engine Used Parts in Toronto” instead of “Toyota Parts Toronto”
  25. no inbound / incoming links
  26. less internal links
  27. incoming links from unrelated websites – your website is about Cars and you have links to it on Computer’s websites.
  28. website submitted to farm’s links web directories
  29. website not present in DMOZ
  30. incorrect using of H1 html header, abusive using or not used at all
  31. using of irrelevant link text anchor – e.g using of “read more” instead of “more methods to improve your memory”.

    32. Web Usability mistakes:

  32. grammatical / misspelling mistakes
  33. you have “page fold” problems
  34. too many images, graphics, flash movies or other elements – the user don’t know what to do
  35. there is no step by step process – the user don’t know how to buy on your website, what is the next step
  36. there is no page with clear info about the shipping, prices or what the client get in return after paying.
  37. too many technical words, sophisticated terms – the users have to much time to think and they likely will leave the website being bored, confused or frustrated without buying anything
  38. using of different style on pages
  39. link sounds different than the subject of the page – e.g – www.yourdomain.com/targeting-different-browsers-within-css and the page has the title “Creating Dynamic Menus with JavaScript” – users are becoming to think that something’s wrong with your website.
  40. unreadable text, too dark background, gray text over dark background or the opposite

    41. Server’s mistakes:

  41. dead links – lots of 404 errors
  42. slow web hosting, lot of downtime
  43. too many server requests – too many CSS / JavaScript Files
  44. you don’t use gzip
  45. your website is not into the root folder but into a second or even worst deep level (www.yourdomain.com/folder/folder/index.html) – Google is giving importance to a website / webpage based on the location – too many level = less important.
  46. unfriendly links – e.g http://www.yourwebiste.com/product.php?categoryid=7&productid=236 instead of http://www.yourwebiste.com/toyota-car-breaks-model13

    47. Domain naming mistakes:

  47. too long domain name
  48. hard to pronounce / memorize domain name
  49. using more than one dash into domain name
  50. irrelevant domain name – e.g Site about Used Cars and the name is referring to computers – this situation is happen when somebody is buying a domain with a precise scope but in time is loosing the interest for that field and is starting writing about different things
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