When building your website, you want to make sure that it is user-friendly and allows your visitors to find the information they are looking for with minimal fuss and bother. It’s important to be aware of the fact that not everyone visiting your site may have the latest hardware and software. A feature you think would be “cool” for your site may actually be unusable for someone on a dial-up connection, for example, and could potentially cause them to leave your site. Here are some guidelines for things to avoid on your website.

Flashy intros

You’ve probably come across sites that display a big flashy intro or splash-screen that you have to click through before you can get to the actual content on the site. There are several problems with these kinds of intros. First, they often take a long time to load, and if your visitors are using a slow dial-up connection (many Internet users still do), they may get impatient and leave your site before they even get to the content. Even if they’re on a fast connection, visitors may become annoyed at having to click through the intro each time they visit your site. Imagine if Amazon forced you to watch a splash screen with a huge version of their logo every time you wanted to buy something from them! You would probably choose to do your online shopping elsewhere.

Graphics

A common mistake I see on many websites is the use of large graphics or too many graphics on a page. Graphics take much longer to load than text, and some sites that are too graphics-heavy are all but unusable on a dial-up connection. Make sure that you keep the file sizes of your graphics small, and only use a small number of graphics on each page.

Sound samples that play automatically

Some musicians’ sites begin playing music in the background as soon as you load them into your browser. This may be acceptable in some cases, but is usually perceived as an annoyance. Visitors to your site want to feel like they are in control of their browser and anything that starts up automatically without their permission will probably irritate them (this is the same reason why pop-up ads are so annoying). If you do decide to have background music on your site, make sure that you provide a simple and obvious way for your visitors to turn it off.

Sites that only work in one browser

Several years ago, Microsoft and Netscape were embroiled in what has been referred to as the “browser wars”, in which each browser maker developed and endorsed proprietary features for web pages that only worked in their browser. This meant that a page that was “designed for” Internet Explorer, for example, would potentially not work correctly in Netscape.

Fortunately, a group of dedicated web developers was able to convince the two companies to support web standards, and most current browsers now strive to support these standards. This means that, in theory at least, if you build your site according to the standards, it will work across different browsers and platforms. (By the way, there are many other browsers in use other than Internet Explorer and Netscape, including Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror.)

Unfortunately, it’s still not uncommon to come across sites that are “designed for” a particular browser. The trouble with this approach is that you will potentially turn away a large number of visitors who don’t use the browser you’ve designed for.

Of course, even if you build your site according to the standards, you should still test your site in as many different browsers as possible to ensure that it’s compatible. Also, remember to test on both Windows and Macintosh systems (and Linux, if it’s available to you). It’s usually impossible to make a site look exactly alike in every browser (there are also variations in how different monitors display colors, for example). However, you want to make sure that your site is at least usable in as many browsers as possible.

Simplicity

Building a website that’s easy to use and works across different browsers and platforms is a complicated task. In general, if you stick to the KISS principal (Keep It Simple, Silly), chances are good that your site will be accessible to a large number of browsers and devices. Keeping it simple does not necessarily mean that your site has to be bland. If you follow best practices and build your site according to standards, you can have a site that is both attractive and accessible to a large audience.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 29th, 2005 at 2:51 pm by Thomas Fowler.

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Author biography: Thomas Fowler is Vice President of Technology and Development at NoteWay Media. He has been involved with music for most of his life and now earns a living building websites.