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Jennifer's Web Design / HTML Blog

By Jennifer Kyrnin, About.com Guide to Web Design / HTML since 1997

Do you commit any of these design sins?

Friday October 3, 2008
PositiveSpace posted an article Common Traits of Bad Web Design in which they include:
  • liquid content columns
    The biggest problem with liquid layouts is when the main content expands to a width that is either too wide to read or too narrow. reducing line length is critical for creating scan lines that are not too long. This means using elastic layouts where the content container has a maximum and minimum width set with the max-width and min-width CSS properties.
  • re-listing every page in the footer
    Most people do this when they want search engines to spider their site. But it's ugly navigation and you can use a sitemap to better effect.
  • repeating navigational elements
    This is a navigation issue that many large sites have. The problem often stems from not defining your information architecture well, or by not rethinking it periodically as more sections are added to the site.
  • not styling form elements
    This is an unfortunate problem as it can be easy to style form elements.
  • using images for large blocks of text
    There are so many problems with this, from usability to accessibility to speed of page downloads.
  • non degradable navigation
    If you use JavaScript or Flash for navigation, you must have an HTML alternative.
  • pointless flash intros
    Many people hate Flash introductory pages. And so many of them have no reason beyond showing off the designers Flash skills.
  • poor contrast between background and type
    Background textures are fun, but text over the top makes that text illegible.
  • not designing for vertical expansion
    This is a sneaky one. Many print designers do this by mistake because they don't understand that Web pages get longer and longer vertically. You can see it when a design requires that text be a specific height, and if it gets longer the page looks wrong. Or with iframes that are really long forcing a vertical scroll bar in the middle of a page.
  • bad typography
    Typography is tricky on the Web, but that doesn't give you the excuse to ignore it. Leaving your headlines to the browsers to define the font, line-height, and so on is just lazy design.
I have a few others that I think are bad that I see in many beginner websites. I've listed them in my article Little Web of Horrors.

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