Web Design - 7 Key Things to Avoid

A search for "web design" on Google returns more than 325 million results. So how do we start eliminating all these so called designers? Here are a few of the most common shortcomings.

Watch out for:

Templates

Subdomains

DIY Hosting

High Renewal Costs

Poor Coding

Inaccessible Design

Advertising / Self Promotion

1. Templates

Watch out for designers offering you a choice of templates. This not only means that they're doing no new design work for their fee but could also have an affect on your search engine ranking. If the search engine robots see the same layout, background images and styles over and over again they could penalise your site for being a copy of another site. Best avoided.

2. Subdomains

Watch out for design services offering you your own domain where the address still includes a reference to another company. You should have a domain in this form - www.yourcompany.com. Watch out for www.yourcompany.hostingcompany.com or www.hostingcompany.com/yourcompany. These forms mean that they are putting your site in a folder of their own site and it doesn't carry as much weight. It's an easy way of them saving money and giving you a lesser sevice.

3. DIY Hosting

Watch out for anyone who does their own hosting. If their server goes down it could mean that your site disappears. Servers can be left on for long periods of time but do need to be restarted occasionally. You don't want your site going down - there could be someone in the middle of using it. If they claim to offer hosting find out if they outsource it to a professional company. This is much safer.

4. High Renewal Costs

Watch out for hidden costs. It's quite common for design companies to offer you a full all singing all dancing site for a great price only for you to find that it will cost you half of that again the following year. There are always ongoing costs to a website, hosting and domain name renewal. If there are no ongoing costs quoted, monthly or annual, be wary.

5. Poor Coding

Watch out for poor coding. HTML, the language of web pages, is developing and changing all the time. In fact, HTML is on its way out to be replaced by an enhanced language called XHTML. Look at a page the designer has done or their own site. View the source code and look at the section between the head tags (the word "head" in between angled brackets). Any mention of "style" or a ".css" file is a good sign. Now look at the section between the body tags. If you see lots of tags in angled brackets like "font" or "td" then the page coding is showing its age.

6. Inaccessible Design

Watch out for inaccessible design. This is very similar to the last point. It's important that your site can be used not only by PC users but also by the visually impaired, people using palmtops, PDAs and mobile devices. You can't afford to reduce your audience by having an inaccessible design.

7. Advertising / Self Promotion

Watch out for the design company using your website as a means of marketing themselves. Whilst having a discreet link to their company site at the foot of the page is quite fair and reasonable, be wary of any additional links or advertising. They could be making money selling advertising space which you're paying for.

Chris Smith works as a web designer, developer and internet marketing consultant. For further information on high quality, good value web design please visit his site - Professional Web Design

In The News:

Could cyborg locusts be the bomb-sniffing dogs of the future?

An international team of archaeologists has uncovered an ancient Biblical era temple in Israel.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced on Monday that he will commit a whopping $10 billion to fight climate change as part of a new initiative.

Three U.S. World War II aircraft have been discovered in a lagoon in Micronesia 76 years after they went missing. The planes, which were part of Operation Hailstone in February 1944, are associated with 7 U.S. servicemen listed as missing in action.

Experts have uncovered a series of grisly walls that are made of human bones at a cathedral in Belgium, the Brussels Times reports.

Elephants are considered one of the smartest species of mammal in the animal kingdom, but a new study says they mourn their dead, even if they did not have a strong relationship with them.

A type of cancer that still afflicts humans has been found in a dinosaur fossil that was unearthed in Canada, according to experts.

A shocking new study says that extreme weather events caused by climate change could result in an economic recession "the likes of which we've never seen before."

NASA’s New Horizons mission is providing scientists with fresh insight into how planets form.

A scuba diver off the coast of Florida has captured stunning video footage of a huge great white shark, said to be 15 to 20 feet long.

Web Design - 7 Key Things to Avoid

Web Design Web Design