It’s unbelievable how many mistakes I’ve made with my Web site over the years that I’d never make when advising someone else about her Web site. There’s something about working on your own stuff that somehow causes your IQ to slip by at least 30 points. Here are a couple I’ve caught.
*Logo centered instead of on the left. I know many sites have their logos in the center of the header, but putting it on the left out of the way is more effective.
*Missing link in the logo. How often do you click on the logo when you want to return to the home page? Yeah, me too and mine had no link. I think it did in the past, but somehow I forgot it in this current design. I added it to the main pages (not all of them).
*A long time ago, I used to have a menu item called, “meryl’s notes.” Er…. Even my mom didn’t know what that was and probably still doesn’t. When I went to other sites, I noticed this problem as I didn’t know the names of their blogs. So I changed that here.
*Main navigation on the right instead of the left. I picked this up from hanging around many talented designers’ sites. Designers loved putting their stuff on the right as it strayed from the norm. Well, if I want to make life easier for future clients, I need to move the navigation to the left.
*Using a div on a header item. I don’t know how this happened, but it did.
Embarrassing, eh? The navigation hasn’t moved yet. I’m waiting on a redesign before doing that. I almost converted it, but I was having problems making the layout look right in my blog and had no more time to try to fix it.
Jakob Nielsen announced his 2005 list of top ten Web design mistakes. I’ve been guilty of the link problem. It wasn’t that my links weren’t obvious, but the fact I made the a link, v link, and h link all the same color. I realized that I rely on other sites to use a different color for v link so I know which links I’ve visited and which I haven’t. So that was immediately and easily fixed with CSS.
2 thoughts on “Web Site Mistakes”
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Wellthen. I was busted.
Working on a new site, this time one that’s set aside specifically for my professional identity.
The design in the queue for the new personal site has the primary nav on the left, but not the bizsite.
Well, until now.
Why? It makes sense.
(And it only required changes of half a dozen lines in a CSS file.)
After coming and reading about the homepage link “on” the homepage thing (not 100% sure why this should be a problem but thats life) I actually realised I didnt have a link back to the main page from any of the others!! (Just been rectified)
Im not sure I would worry overmuch about whether the nav links are on the left or right, that seems to be an aesthetic(sp?) issue or else I have completely missed the plot with that one? One thing I will say though is that in my mind the navigational links should appear in the code at least above everything else (with an option to skip over them for non visual readers). You can use stylesheets to position them wherever you like after that.
My biggest problem between sites I do for others and my own is file size. In particular images. I feel that on my own personal site then it doesnt matter to much (good thing), if people dont want to hang around then so be it, but with a corporate its always an issue.