Website Pitfalls

If you are not careful you can spend a lot of money on a website and get very little or no benefit from it. In fact, your new website can hurt your business without you even realising.

Some of the technologies/techniques that can be used to create websites are best avoided. Some like the plague actually.

Search engines like text and anything that hides text is going to make your website less effective. Below I will list some of the main ways that you, as a site owner, can shoot yourself in the foot by making the text less accessible.

Splash Screens

If you visit a website and are met with some sort of animation or a page that says something like:

This is my site. Click to Enter.

You have just come across a splash screen. These are very bad for a number of reasons. The two main being:

Each extra click that you force a visitor to make increases the chance the that they go somewhere else. The average time that a visitor looks at a web page is apparently 8 seconds.
Note that you never see big successful companies like Amazon or Tesco having a splash screen.
Eventually other sites will link to your site. The usual way is to link to the site front page. In my case this would be http://kotarski.co.uk. Now if this is a splash screen it means that Google and the other search engines will rank this valueless, as well as textless, page more highly than your first real page of content. This is not good.

Text As Images

Typography within a webpage can be a bit limited which leads to a common problem: namely presenting text as pictures. So if you want to have nice looking text there is a temptation to have the text replaced by an image of that text. However, search engines can’t read the text when it is presented in this way.

Frames

Frames are a way of wrapping up some web content within a web page. Essentially a page is hidden inside another page. There are a couple of big problems here. Firstly, there isn’t a way to bookmark where you are inside a frame. Secondly, because many search engines don’t look inside frames they effectively hide your content.

Flash

Adobe Flash is a technology for producing animations which can be embedded in a website. It can also be used to create fancy menus and indeed a whole website. A website created with Flash can look, well, flash. However, if you need to be found by search engines, and who doesn’t, it is a real killer. Search engines index text and a flash website doesn’t have any text. The upshot of this is that the content of your website is invisible. Just using Flash menus can cause your site not to be indexed because the search engines are unable to navigate the menus.

To summarize it is possible to have a website that Google can’t see because all of the text is hidden. The site may look nice but contain no actual text. This will not do your business any good at all.

A very good book is Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. It is short (201 pages incluging the index) is straight to the point and very well illustrated. A must have book for anyone thinking who wants to have a serious website.

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