Over the past 13 years that we've been in business, we've seen a lot of good web designs and a lot of bad ones. We've compiled a "Top 10 List" of the most common web design mistakes that we've seen, to hopefully educate customers when they're planning out their own web sites. This list isn't any kind of an official world-wide standard list, this is just a list of the top mistakes we've seen. The items in this list also appear in no particular order of importance, they all apply equally. This list also doesn't cover every possible mistake a person can make when planning their web site because there are thousands of ways to make a bad web site, and just as many ways to make a great web site. But, if you at least pay attention to this list when you are planning your own web site, this should keep you on the smart and sensible track and keep you from contributing to the ever growing list of web site disasters that continue to plague the internet. Take the time to listen to professional advise from people in the field who have seen what works and what doesn't. It'll make the difference between you having a successful web site, or one that potential customers and search engines avoid.

1. You spend more time telling people how great you are as a company, but not how you're going to solve their problems.
This is the biggest evil of all web site design evils. Anybody can brag about themselves, and anybody can post semi-anonymous testimonials on their web site or other literature claiming how great they are. But what good does that do for your customers? Do you realize how many people actually believe unsubstantiated claims in would-be testimonials on a web site or other literature? Unless you provide your customers with phone numbers to contact those people supposedly making these testimonials, then you're just wasting everybody's time. The only time that anybody ever believes any bragging about your company is when you're not the one doing the bragging or providing semi-anonymous testimonials. Tell the customer how you're actually going to solve their problems and you'll earn a lot more credibility and trust. Leave the bragging up to somebody else to do.

2. You let your kid (who is in high-school) design and/or maintain your company's web site.
OK, it's understandable that every parent wants to be proud of how smart and accomplished their children are. But, turning your kid loose with a copy of something like Micro$oft FrontPage and suddenly putting them in charge of designing or maintaining your web site is the same as shooting your business in the foot. Yes, Junior may be a little smarter than you when it comes to computers, but we can guarantee you that Junior doesn't know anything about business management, internet commerce, web standards, or how search engines work. Here's an idea, let Junior manage all of your advertising and do your company's taxes at the end of the year too. What, he/she isn't smart enough or doesn't have the necessary experience to handle those kinds of tasks? Well, the same rule applies to your web site. Leave professional services in the hands of professionals, not high-school kids.

3. You believe that all you need is a copy of Micro$oft FrontPage, Publisher, or Word to create/maintain your web site.
Sorry, Micro$oft doesn't even use FrontPage, Publisher, or Word in any part of their own web site. If web site "generator" programs aren't even good enough to maintain their creators' web sites, why in the world would you want to use one to maintain your own web site? There is no substitute for a human webmaster, the most sophisticated web site generator program in the world is not going to create anything more than a boring and amateur looking web site. What's more, it isn't going to teach you web standards that you need to know or how to design a site that will play right into the hands of search engines. If you don't cater to search engines, then you might as well not even bother putting up a web site because that's where more than 90% of your traffic is going to come from. If you put up a site that doesn't play into the hands of search engines, you'll get stuck at the bottom of their search result lists or possibly even blacklisted if you use techniques that search engines frown upon. Again, there is no substitute for a human webmaster!

4. You plan your web site with more of your own pleasure and/or amusement in mind, rather than your customers' needs.
One of the worst (and most common) mistakes people make when planning their web site is that they think the web site's purpose is to please or amuse them, they never take into consideration why a potential customer came to their web site and what they need their web site to do in order to satisfy the customer's needs. When planning your site, for every page - ask yourself "what customer problem does this page solve?"...If you have to sit and think about the answer to that question, or make up some half-baked answer from out in left field to justify the existence of that page - then take it off your list, it's an unnecessary page. Your web site is there to serve the needs of your customers, not for your own pleasure and/or amusement. Hopefully you'll also take this into consideration before embedding annoying sounds or music into your web pages.

5. You're so fascinated with eye-candy and so paranoid about web security that you lock search engines out of your web site.
Some people think they've got to have every bell & whistle under the sun on their web site, like animated intro pages, drop-down menus, or animated Flash based menus. They think all that fluff is going to impress their web site visitors and it will influence their buying decision. HOGWASH! First of all, that stuff just makes your site take longer to load and the novelty of that stuff wears off real fast, so it becomes an annoyance and people will start avoiding your web site. Secondly, search engines can't see past that stuff, so they can't index your site. People that are so paranoid about web security that think their web site has to be SSL encrypted all the way around are also blocking search engines from indexing their site (yes, this really happens, more often than you might think). You think putting a link to "Skip Intro" is the answer? Well, only if you don't have Javascript or Flash based menus, and if your entire site isn't SSL encrypted. But still, if you have a link to skip the intro, isn't that just like saying "this really isn't important for you to see, I just thought I'd pointlessly waste your time for a while"? Don't annoy our block out the most important visitors to your web site!

6. You think you actually know professional document formatting, when you really have no idea at all.
The biggest problem with web sites where the owner actually maintains it through a content management system or a web page generator program, is that the majority of the owners' document formatting knowledge only goes as far as what they've learned from using cheesie off-the-shelf banner/sign maker programs. The tell-tale signs of these people are ones who habitually use center justified text, excessive use of bold text, too many headings per page, excessive use of bulleted lists, too many font face/color/size changes per page, and pages so long that they seem to scroll forever. Aside from this just looking totally unprofessional, search engines can see this and they'll give your site a low ranking no matter how relevant your site is to a person's search criteria. When planning your site, listen to the advise of a professional and stick to it, because it's not any harder to do things the right way.

7. You upload full size pictures to your site before resizing them, then rely on image size attribute tags to change their display size.
Going back to the previous topic of people using content management systems and web page generators to maintain their own sites...Many people who use these upload full size pictures from their camera and use their web site program to change the display size of the photo instead of actually resizing it in a photo editor before they upload it. What's the difference? Changing the image display size in your web site program doesn't change the file size of the image. Even though the picture may look like it only takes up a 2 inch by 2 inch square on the screen, people are still stuck downloading a huge file before that little picture displays on their screen. On the average, raw photos straight out of a digital camera are 8 megs in size (or more, depending on the camera's megapixels). If your pages don't fully load within 10 seconds on an average broadband connection, search engines are going to penalize your web site and people are going start avoiding your site, especially those on dial-up or cellular internet connections. Learn how to properly edit photos before using them in your web site, or rely on the services of a professional.

8. You model your web site design after somebody else's site.
Just because you like somebody else's web site design and color scheme, doesn't necessarily make it right for your web site. This is especially true for those businesses that have an actual storefront, but may not be totally applicable to internet-only businesses. If you do have a storefront and you design your web site to look like something that you totally are not, then you are going to create immediate doubt and distrust in the minds of your customers. If you run a small town "Mom & Pop" shop and you design your web site to look like you're a major corporate conglomerate in a big city, guess what your customers are going to think about you when they see your store and your web site. They're going to think that you're out to deceive people, and that is exactly what you're doing. The same thing applies to the color scheme you choose for your web site. If your color scheme in your store is mostly green and tan colors, use that on your web site too, don't use colors that look nothing like your actual business.

9. You didn't use a spell checker and now your business looks like you're anything but credible professionals.
Quite possibly the most common mistake people make with web sites are spelling errors and not bothering to recruit outside proof readers to check their site for them. As a general rule, people on the internet are very unforgiving and like to critique everything they see. A web site full of spelling errors will erase your credibility in no time flat and make you look like anything but a professional in your line of business. A web site full of grammatical and punctuation errors will also have the exact same result. Utilize proof readers, and be sure that you use more than one (3 is a good number), preferably people not related to you and people who don't work for you. You want your proof readers to be as unbiased as possible, and you want to use as many as you can because one may find a mistake that the others overlooked. Again, the key here is for your web site to make you look like credible professionals, not a bunch of uneducated hacks. If people see that you can't spell correctly, they're naturally going to assume that you can't do your job correctly, either.

10. You didn't make your site easy to navigate and made information hard to find.
This issue seems to be a common mistake that even the biggest companies in the world are guilty of. Web sites need to be broken down into three separate layers in order to make them easy to navigate and make it easy for people to find the information they are looking for. (1) Sections, (2) Categories within Sections, and (3) Items within Categories. The only parts of a web site that this rule doesn't apply to are things like "About Us" pages, "Contact Us" pages, "F.A.Q." pages and other uncategorized information. Another thing that falls into this mistake category are vague navigational menus. For example, menus that use icons rather than text or menus that don't tell people where they lead to until they hover their mouse pointer over different parts of the menu. Tell people where they are going and then take them there as quickly as possible. People don't like surprises on web pages and they don't like having to click on link after link just to find what they're looking for. Making your web site hard for people to navigate and understand is the quickest way to send potential customers fleeing to your competition.