Kalkran.COM

Today, on Kalkran.COM: The fifteen (+one!) sins to designing a webpage.

• Animated GIFs
  Animated GIFs are soo 1990's. I remember using them on my geocities website! And that, my dear reader, is almost prehistorical.
• Slow download times
  Nothing makes me stop browsing a website as slow load times. Waiting for the server to respond, takes up valuable time of your reader. Nobody likes waiting.

• Unreadable text
  Like.. Low contrast with the background: this, impossible colour combinations or a background that distracts too much from the content
• Blink & Marquee
  BLINK is EVIL. And Marquee is outdated. And they're annoying. Your turn.
• Looonngg pages
  Ever been on a site that loads for ages? And you just watch your little scrollbar getting smaller by the second. And when it finally finishes loading, you pick up your microscope and find that all that is left of your scrollbar are five nanometers. Lots of content is good, just organise it well, make pages.
• Under Construction
  If it's under construction, why do you even have a website? If it's not ready, don't list it. Simple as that.
• Background Sound
  I once was in the U.S.A, in a museum, and they had computers you could use for browsing the internet. I opened up a page, and to my horror, the volume was set to max and everyone in the museum heard it. It was really lousy music, too. That is just one reason not to use background music
• Designed for a specific browser / resolution / colour setting
  With such a variety of browsers around, why would you design your site to only work in (e.g) Internet Explorer. (bad example). This is killing your visits.
• Spelling/grammar mistakes
  Nothing looks as unprofessional as having spelling and/or grammar mistakes all over your website. Personally, as soon as the spelling/grammar looks really bad, I'm out - There's plenty more websites on the internet.
• Tables for layout
  Again: Sooo 1990's. DIVs styled with CSS are the norm now!
• Status bar text
  Ancient. Annoying.
• Too much images
  Lowering your loading speed, having a lot of gaps all over your website while it's loading. Not my favorite.
• Bad content
  Content is what the people come to your site for. Bad content and they're off again to google or wikipedia. Another visit lost.
• Hard to navigate
  If I can't find how to get to your (e.g) tutorials section, why would I stick around and look for it? If you cant even design your site with the user in mind, I might as well find someone who can do that. And probably write better tutorials too!
• Frames
  Frames can be good, but only if you know how to use them

And lastly, if you're writing a personal blog. Nobody cares, really. If you're just writing about yourself and nothing else, you're bound to lose visitors. Unless you have a strong sense of humour and are a good writer.