Just before you bring your website for hosting, please review these common mistakes most people make in web design;
– Keep every character that is not visible to the human eye visiting the web page in low case. <HTML> is wrong, while <html> is correct. Index.html is wrong while index.html is correct. To prove to you that Index.html and index.html are different click on the licks below:
Correct: www.hawlast.com/index.html
Wrong: www.hawlast.com/Index.html (Note the capital ‘I’).
– Design a website that appears correctly in different browsers, screen resolution not withstanding. The easiest way to check this is to check using Internet Explorer (IE), and then Firefox Browsers.
– A good website should be viewed without horizontal scrolling in both smaller and larger screen resolutions. The main cause of this problem is images that are too wide than the width you have set for the web page. Use percentages as the width of the containers (<tables> etc) around the web page elements to solve this problem, if this does not work the image size –the banner – might be the problem.
– Slow page loading. Most of us in Kenya use dial-up internet connections to access the web. If your page does not load fast enough, visitors will move to another site. Slow website / page load may be remedied by;
* Reducing the size and optimizing the images for the web.
* Learn to use valid HTML code W3C. W3C compliant code will load faster than HTML coding with errors. Validate your codes.
* Use external CSS (Cascading Style Sheet)
Avoid free web hosting. Register your own domain from the start to benefit from the PageRank and links that will accrue from the start. And again it’s a case of credibility. Are you going to trust someone with your money if they can not afford USD 5.5 per month for hosting a website?
Respond to this post and let me know what infuriates you the most about websites and poor design?
