Sooner or later, everyone, even the most technophobic web users, dabble in a little web design. After all what could be more interesting than dedicating a page to your favorite pop star or hero? What could be better than writing a little about your hobby or interest? Perhaps you could even turn that hobby into an online business – but first there are a few technical challenges to avoid, not least learning how to design web pages. Some people dip their toes gently in the water... while others step back, take a run, and dive bomb in. Fortunately these days there are lots of tutorials, and lots of different ways of approaching it, from learning HTML to using content management systems and existing templates to do all the work for you. The actual process of creating the web page is beyond the scope of this article, but rest assured once you get there, these are the things to avoid.
Day-Glow-Colour-Bomb-Text
Usually this is on a black page. Day-glow-colour-bomb-text is the single most heinous crime in the universe. Those guilty of it surely believe they are adding vibrancy and life into the page – in reality they are killing (with migraine headaches) every poor soul who happens to stumble upon the page. Of course if that's what you want go ahead. If you want a professional looking page then use as few fonts as possible, in as few colours as possible.
Centered Text
Only poets are allowed to use centered text. The rest of us must content ourselves with only using centering for images and the occasional quote. Centered text just doesn't look clean, tidy, or modern. Centered text and images running down the middle of the window leaves visitors wondering if the page was created in 1995 and hasn't been updated since.
Nowadays it is possible to justify the text in web pages and well worth finding out how as there are situations where justified text adds significantly to the look (even in comparison to left aligned text). You can't really go wrong with left aligned text though, just watch out for hanging lines (a single of words hanging at the bottom of a paragraph), picture placement, extra spaces between words and punctuation, and soon you'll have nice crisp columns of text that put the professionals to shame.
Web Pages that Scroll Horizontally
It's hard enough scrolling up and down, without then giving your users the headache of having to scroll left and right as well. Good design practice insists that the website fit on the screen horizontally. If you have a 22 inch monitor in some megalythic screen resolution don't assume that everyone else uses the same setup. Indeed laptops are now outselling desktops, and have traditionally had a slightly lower resolution. Nor does everyone with high resolution like to squander their screen real estate by stretching the browser the full horizontal width across the screen. In addition to this, the longer a line of text becomes, then the more difficult it is to read. Long lines make it harder for the reader to find the beginning of the next line, and it becomes a far more uncomfortable experience since they have to use their neck muscles as well.
Music in Web Pages
Music in web pages is enough to bring out a scream from even the most quiet and well mannered of surfers. Most people are already listening to music while working/surfing, and they don’t need someone else's music suddenly blasting out, playing along, clashing with their music. Not to mention the fact that what you think is awesome music is not necessarily what your visitors would consider to be good music. Now that tabs are in use, having been popularized by browsers such as Firefox, there's nothing worse than opening up a few search results in tabs only to be scared out of your skin by the sudden and unexpected burst of music tearing out of the speakers. This starts a game of hunt the tab… and it's never easy finding the one that's playing music. Guaranteed once the offending tab is found, it will be closed immediately to restore harmony to the users computer. Music just scares away your visitors. Unless you really know your audience this is one to avoid. Weird noises in the background are also to be avoided. An alternative to actually playing music (whether your guests like it or not) is to provide the functionality on your web page, whereby an interested user can play your playlists through a flash player on your website.
Dithered GIFs, Animated or Otherwise
Dithered gif images hail from the mid 90s and not only are hideous things, but also lead one's mind back to those unhappy times when everything you did on the internet was through a 56k modem and your computer crashed every couple of hours. We’ve all seen such gifs (unfortunately). Basically, back in those days computers had sixteen colours (256 colours if you were lucky), and so the idea of using dot patterns of two or more colours to make it look like there were more colours seemed like a good idea at the time. The big problem was it doesn't look very nice. It looked horrible then and it looks horrible now. In fact it looks even more horrible now because everything else is so crisp and clear. All modern computers (except a couple of specialist units) are capable of displaying several tens of millions of colours so there’s no way we can excuse or forgive the use of dithered gifs. Especially inexcusable are ones which have been enlarged at some point in their lives so that the dithering is especially obvious. Take advantage of all those colours, and turn off dithering.
