Roberts Web Essentials Blog

This is a list of common mistakes and pitfalls that can harm your visitors’ experience or how well search engines will rank your website.  Most of these can be avoided with a little common sense or proper web design techniques.

Poor Color Selection

Use colors that are not complimentary or do not provide good contrast for reading.

Poor Font Selection

Use fonts that are hard to read because the style is too creative or the size is too small.

Images not optimized for the web

Use lots of large images that have not been optimized for the web.  This can cause the page to load very slow.

Too Little Text on the Page

Just put a few words on a page. While there will be times when this is appropriate, keep in mind that is it inconvenient to make your visitors go to lots of pages to read what could have been said in a paragraph or two. Not to mention, search engines will determine that the page has no real content and will tend to lower the importance of the page.

Poorly written HTML code

Poorly written HTML code can affect how browsers display the page contents and the page may not appear the way it was intended for your visitors. Again, search engines need to interpret your page and they only read the html code, they do not pay attention to images. If they cannot properly interpret the page due to poorly written code, then they will not be able to five an appropriate page rating.

Try to Fool the Search Engines

Of course all website owners want their pages to come up at the top of search results. In order to achieve this, some web designers will try to fool the search engines by hiding keywords and using other “tricks”. Do you think they have not seen it all before? Even if you are successful at fooling the search engines in the short term, they will figure out what the latest trick is, and that’s when your site’s ranking can suffer.  Or worse, you can get blacklisted by the search engines.  And once you are blacklisted, it will be a long time before your pages come up at all in search results (if ever again).

Most often web pages will look almost identical on most computers.  However, there are a number of reasons why they will not likely appear exactly the same.

1. Different browsers will interpret HTML code in slightly different ways.  Most of the time these differences are very minor and not noticeable. If one browser was to stand out in this respect it is Internet Explorer. You would think that once the standard has been set, then every browser developer would follow them, but they do have some flexibility in the application of the standards, which causes these differences.
2. Individual user settings in their browser. Most browsers offer the user the ability to customize some settings such as default font and font size, just to name a few. So the text appearance might be a little (or even a lot) different than what was specified in your site.
3. Individual computer monitor settings can also have an impact. To start off, you can usually change the screen resolution of your monitor.  You can also change the color options.

For these reasons, you should never expect that your website will look EXACTLY the same on every computer. However, the above reasons are ones that are not within your control and most of them can be addressed well enough that your site looks ALMOST exactly the same on different computers.

There are a few things within the developers control that can also cause web pages to appear differently on some computers.

1. Poorly written HTML code can cause this.  Some browsers are intuitive and are able to better interpret poorly written HTML code.  Other browsers will simply get “confused” and the page will display differently than it was supposed to. This is easily addressed by making sure the pages contain only valid HTML.  If your website developer does not offer this, or just plain doesn’t do it, you need a new website developer, period!
2. Some web features are not supported in all browsers.  So if you use one of those features on a web page, then you have already “told” some of your visitors that you don’t care if they can see all the information. A classic example of this is flash media. Apple’s Safari browser does not support flash, and some smartphones and tablets are in the same boat. I’ll skip the debate on whether that is a good decision or not, but keep this in mind before you tell your developer that the site MUST have flash.
3. Poor page layout can also impact how a page appears. I am amazed at how many “higher profile” websites display in awkward ways.  Sometimes a column that is supposed to be on the right side has been moved below the page content and appears on the left side.  Sometimes this is because they are experimenting with software or just don’t know how to control the layout. But really, once your site is up and running, there is no reason for this to happen as the developer should be testing how the site appears in most browsers.

So, by making sure your web developer is paying attention to a few details, most web pages can look similar enough across most computers.

Welcome to the Roberts Web Essentials blog, where you will find helpful information about web sites.  This blog is intended for businesses and people that already have or will have a website.  Read on and check back for new posts!  And while you are at it, feel free to leave a comment on any post.

Topics that I will cover include:

• How important is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and what should be done with your website to improve search rankings?
• How to build a terrible website
• and more…

Peter