Hello everyone, many website owners make schoolboy errors, that makes their website, well, crap. These errors can cause an annoyance to a large percentage of visitors, and can actually drive traffic away. If you avoid all the reasons I have listed below, you are sure to have an outstanding annoying free website!
Just remember value. If you provide that on your website, your visitors will keep coming back time and time again for more.
Use A Free Hosting Company
If you use a free hosting company, you may often get a huge ad on top of your website, before your content actually starts. This can put people off, and can look ugly. Also you wont have a unique url, it will be something like yoursite.freewebspace.com. I’m not saying that sites like freewebs and tripod are crap, it’s a great place to start of, just you cant really look professional hosted on a free service like that. Instead, I would strongly recommend to use a reliable shared hosting company like Host Gator.
Have No Content Above The Fold
Some websites have huge headers, and if visitors want to find content, they have to scroll really far down the page to find any content.
Have A Splash Page
Having a page before your actual website, that says click here to enter, with loads of heavy images can take a long time to load for people with a slow Internet connection, and can look very bad (unless you are a pro designer). You are actually making it harder for people to access your website. Some splash pages can look awesome, like this one below, but it can still be an annoyance to your website visitors. I would generally avoid them.
Create Your Website Just With Flash
Flash websites can sometimes be awesome, but most of them with heavy content can take a long time to load, even on a broadband connection. Plus search engines wont be able to index each individual page on your site, because it’s all flash. S.E.O will suck, and you will have to do some heavy manual promotion.
Not Check Your Website For Cross Browser Compatibility
If you want your website to be accessible by everyone, then it needs to be viewable by most if not all browsers, or at least latest browsers.
Have Music Playing On Your Website
Websites that automatically play music when loaded are very annoying. Sometimes people can’t find the pause of stop button, and it can be very annoying and off putting.
Opt In For A Second Best Domain
I have nothing wrong with .net or .biz, but why opt for second best domain? When you know you really want that .com!
Link To Non Existing Pages
People always link to stuff that doesn’t always exist. This can be very annoying for the end user, especially if they have been searching for a long time for something, and then your linking to something that’s not actually there.
Lock Copy And Pasting
Websites which have a lock on, that prevents people from right clicking can be very annoying. I know they are just trying to stop people nabbing their content, but even still *cough* print screen *cough*.
Build Your Website Out Of Tables
Building your website out of tables is a very bad move these days. XHTML and CSS is what you should be using. I have nothing against tables, and you should still use them within your site if needs be, just don’t have your whole site based around tables.
Have Annoying Pop-Ups
Websites that have pop-ups every time you visit them can be very off putting, and most of all very annoying. Don’t do it, even if you are getting paid a measly 1 cent per pop-up. It will put your visitors off!
Slow Loading Pages
Pages that contain hundreds of intense images can often crash people’s browsers, or just slow down their computer, and painfully take a long time to load.
Having A Counter On Your Website
Displaying a free counter on your website, can look very bad. You shouldn’t be showing off how many hits you get, that’s what sites like Alexa and compete are for. Things you should be showing off are your RSS Subscriber count and your Twitter Followers.
Stupid Repeating Background Images
Websites that use the same small background image that repeats itself both horizontally and vertically are generally crap. For example, a Pokemon image repeating itself all over your screen. Very annoying!
Use A Bad Color Palette
It can be very bad to use a color palette on your website, where all the colors clash. A great place to find color palettes is ColorLovers or ColorSchemer.
Use Stupid Text Effects
Using text effects that you get off these free online text generators can make your website look very tacky, not ‘cool’ as they make out it will look. My advice, use photoshop for your text effects.
Being Inconsistent
Using all different types of fonts across your website is inconsistent. If you use one font for your paragraphs and one font for your headers, then you should be safe. The same goes for text size, colors, etc.
Having To Scroll Horizontally Across Websites
Don’t you hate it when websites are too large for your screen? I’m not taking about the odd few pixels, like double if not triple your screen width. Websites should generally be no more than 1000px wide, 900 to be safe.
Using Rubbish Alternative Software
Say for instance you were building a big forum website, and you wanted it to achieve and have a thriving community of active members. But you couldn’t afford vBulletin or Invision Power Board, so you settled for phpBB (second best). It’s free for a reason. (phpBB is a very good forum software for beginners, but it just cant compete with the big boys).
Also some comments say I’m implying that WordPress is crap, but WordPress isn’t second best, it’s the best.
Animated Gif’s And General Rubbish
Basic website clutter can just make a website crap. Unnecessary junk that fills web pages, just to have content is very bad. A great example of this is the worst website in the world. Click on the image below to be amazed!
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