10 Ways to avoid the pitfalls of web design

You are a new web designer and you are excited about coming up with new designs. There are some guidelines that you need to go by so you will not fall and have the title of a "bad designer". Everything that you will come in contact with does not mean you have to use EVERYTHING. Here are some ways to avoid the pitfall of web design.

1.) When you come across fancy fonts, do not use them. As a new web designer, you have to convey your message to the world. If they are not able to read it, how is the world  going to know what you are trying to say.

2.)  Do not play music on your site. It is a cool feature, but in the past they tried to integrate it on websites and it failed. Besides, the designer would put up music that makes you get off the site as soon as possible or just turn it off all together. So do not use music on you site EVER!

3.) Avoid using to many introduction pages or introduction movies. They are not interested in what the introduction says, they want to get to the content they went to your site for. The only time you would leave it on your site is if it is something really interesting. Even then, you can't count on everybody to like what you put on your introduction page.

4.) When you place text down, make sure you do not have any grammar errors. This is the most embarrassing thing to see. And the words that people misspell are the easy ones. How are you going to be a professional with mistakes like that? Take your content into Microsoft Word and check the spelling.

5.) Avoid bad color schemes. This will get you a bad name. If you have the wrong color together, your visitors will leave as soon as they see it, or they will have seizures. Go search the web and see what colors really look good together. Never use more than 3 colors for you website.

6.) Do not have long pages.This will just drive a person crazy. They would not know where a website would begin or end. ESPECIALLY when you do not put a "Top" link on your page. They will tell everybody they know about how bad your site is and how long it is.

7.) Have working links or if you put up links, have them a different color. Broken links is never good. It is also annoying to have typed links on your website and they are not linked up. That's extra work on the visitor viewing your website. Yeah they can copy and paste, but you can also link up those links. If you do this, then put the working links in different colors from the ones that are not linked.

8.) Make you point, and then leave it alone. Do not go over board. Stay on topic and move on. Do not get off of topic. It is also a good idea to make your point as short as you can. The reason being is because most of the people that will view your website have a short attention span, so it is a good idea to make your point and go to the next point.

9.) Do not put a picture up if you are going to forget the alt tags. You have to have your website accessible to EVERYBODY. Do not put a picture on the site and half of the people see it don't even know what it is. Then when you try to explain, you yourself don't even know what the picture is or what it stands for. Never forget to put alt tags on pictures. That should be the next thing you do after you put the picture up.

10.) Avoid using long URL's. If you have long URL's, the person will not remember what the name was. They would want to tell other people, but the name is too long.

The way you can avoid these pitfalls and others is to remember what ever bothers you on websites that you have come across, your audience will be annoyed with your mistakes as well.