Jim Cook at Design Refugee has assembled 50 Common Web Design Mistakes. Jim has been teaching web design for years and has an all-star line up of clients including the Catholic Church, Country singer Vince Gill, the St. Louis Sports Commission, the Ronald McDonald House and the NCAA.
My favorite points include:
Page Titles
1. Untitled documents
2. Same title for all pages
3. Non-descriptive titles
Meta Tags
4. Duplicate meta information on all pages
Site Structure
5. No index.html (or equivalent) in the root directory
6. Disorganized file structure
7. Uploading non-web files
Pages
8. “Under Construction” pages.
9. Frames
10. Horizontal scrolling
11. Worthless content
12. Out-of date content
13. Overly long pages
14. Unnecessarily short pages
15. “Orphan” pages
16. “Alien” pages
Navigation, navigation, who’s got the navigation?
17. Pages without navigation
18. Broken links
19. “Hidden” links
20. “False” links
21. Menus that move
22. Inconsistent navigation
Headlines
23. Restyling text instead of using heading tags
24. Using heading tags for design
Body Text
25. Using images for text
26. Justified type
27. Using </br> </br>
instead of <p>
28. Using
to control line breaks within paragraphs
29. Typos and grammatical errors
30. Type too small
31. Too little contrast between text and background
32. Using non-breaking spaces to align type
33. “Ransom” note styling
Images
34. Images without the alt attribute
35. Jigsaw puzzle graphics
36. Resizing images in the browser
37. Improper image format
38. Use of transparent PNGs without Explorer fix
Animations
39. Gratuitous Flash
40. Non-stop animations
41. Too many animations
42. Use of the BLINK tag: Thankfully some browsers .
Philosophy
43 “Sheet of paper” pages
44 Confusing content and design
Miscellaneous
45. No contact information
46. Reliance on email links
47. Failure to respond to contacts
48. Auto-play sounds
49. Opening too many windows
50. Failure to check for cross-browser inconsistencies
Popularity: 1% [?]
April 25th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Could I add another?
27b) Using instead of
April 25th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Oops - last comment didn’t display properly.
you’ve got the slash the wrong side of br in item 27.
May 5th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Well a good effort to list them all up together.