What not to do

[Html]

Hi there.So what are the things you should not to do when building your website? :)

• Wild background
• Mad fonts?
• Coloured text / or too much of it

[Natechs]

Fonts that are only on your systems. I hate that.

[justsomeguy]

Splash pages. Any page with a single link on it should be removed, just load the page it would link to instead.

[Synook]

Automatic music (esp. with no "mute" button).

[jeffman]

I'm surprised no one's said it, though it's more structural than presentational. Table layouts are history. Use CSS and divs to position things.Any multimedia that cannot be stopped with one OBVIOUS mouse click is death.(With rare exceptions) Pages that only work in IE or Firefox, etc. Whenever possible, design to accommodate all current browsers. It really can be done.Most functional tools that take time to work. E.g., I rollover a menu, and have to watch pretty things happen before I can choose an item from the dropdown/flyout/whatever. There's display and there's function. If it does something, it must do it immediately. No games.Amendment on splash pages. A splash is okay if it's also a login portal. Gotta login somewhere, right? But that's really the only excuse. What JSG means is a page that's like, "Here's my pretty picture/movie/whatever. Click HERE for the REAL content." Agreed. That sux.Any javascript that throws up multiple alerts/confirms in a row. YUCK!Any page that says it's under construction. It's the Web. It's ALL under construction. We get that.

[Natechs]

I have one more. Frames. I hate them.I will agree with justsomeguy and Deirdre's Dad that those are horrendous.

[Html]

These are well said not dos. But at the same time colleges and schools teach these sort of things. Usage of tables for a design, like a template.No web standards, some go along with the fact that if it all works fine and well in any browser its good enough.What about a flash video? Your own one on a page?

[global.user]

No one said it ?Big and slow.

[Jonas]

To sum up: Any myspace profile page.

[Html]

I am mainly asking to avoid making any mistakes with a few pages.Um, I was checking out some DVD movie film sites, like beemovie.co.uk or the Ice age one.

[speculumcm]

Hey, nobody has mentioned cloaking, So do not display different content to users than to bot.

[jeffman]

There are two kinds of background: for content areas and for non-content areas. Content areas should have very little pattern in the background. A gentle gradient is okay. Plaid is bad. When I say non-content, I'm thinking of the sort of pages that center a 780px content area and on larger monitors have a lot of leftover space on the sides. As long as it doesn't clash with the content area, you have more freedom with the background of such non-content areas. But don't go insane.Fonts should come close to the same rules I teach in my technical writing class. Maximum of 3 font faces to a page. One for display (like titles and banners), one for headlines, and one for body type. Any more than that gets confusing. If you want to stick to the rules for printing on paper, use a sans-serif font for headlines and a serif font for body type. But many readers find serif fonts hard to read on screen, especially in smaller sizes, so you might use a sans-serif font for body type also. If you do that, it should be the same as your headline font. E.g., mixing Helvetica with Verdana will be distracting.If you want your banner font to be playful, just make sure its appropriate to the content. Jokerman makes no sense for a law firm.Some technical documents benefit from the use of a lot of different spot coloration in the text. Other than that, body type should mostly stick to the same color throughout a document, and probably the whole site. Likewise, use the same color for all/most headlines.

[smartalco]

To sum up: Any myspace profile page.

I think this guy pretty much just summed up the entire thread.