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Common Design Flaws & How To Avoid Them

© Christopher Cummings

There are many, many mistakes online. This is my attempt to categorize my personal top three. Or two. Or fifty. We'll see what happens.

Picture it: You punch in a Web address & hit return. The screen flashes, indicating you're about to see the website ... and the page just hangs. And hangs. And hangs. And you leave.

This is a common problem on the Web. Sometimes the problem is hardware related — your server is overloaded, for example, or your service provider is experiencing technical difficulties.

More often than not, the problem is the page design — that is, your website suffers from one of the following:

• Too many pictures
• Too many fonts (type faces)
• Too many scripts
• Overly complex HTML code

Not only do these things slow your site down, they can make it look ... well ... amateurish.

You've seen sites that look like they were slapped together by someone with zero design experience. Maybe you've even made a couple. I certainly have. These sites are garish: Extraneous pop up messages, tons of fonts (none of them appealing), useless javascript rollovers, multiple 30k+ graphics on a single page, etc.

These are Bad Sites from the Bad Place. You don't want to emulate these sites.

Instead, think about your favorite sites and match them against the list above. For example, not counting the advertising, how many fonts do you see on a given page?

Let's look at one of my favorite sites, eonline.com. There's the E! logo, then there's everything else. The links, the text, it's all one font: Arial. Even the category graphics are derivations of this same font.

There are many graphics on the E! homepage as I look at it right now (6/23/00). But they're mostly 1k or less, with three that are over 3k.

However, the combination of scripts and HTML code pushes E! into the Bad Place. The HTML for this page — which contains javascript, image maps and form submits — weighs in at over 32k.

32k is a big download, in itself. Factor in all those 3k+ images and all those little 1k images ... and you get one, big slow-loading page.

By comparison, the Lycos Gamesville homepage (http://www.gamesville.com), not counting the advertising, is 29k total (HTML, scripts & images). That's a fast download. That's a good thing.

How can you optimize your site? Basically, keep it simple.

• Limit the number of fonts to three or less (preferably less)
• Limit the number of graphics.

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