Below are some of the most common mistakes that are continually made by new website designers, use this article to learn from other designers mistakes and watch out.

Background music

You may have come across sites with background music before, some people may enjoy it and some may hate it. The general rule is know your target audience, so for example if your website is about rock music then having rock music in the background may not be such a bad thing but having something else may tend to grind on the user. If the website is aimed at a broader range of people then you should scrap the concept of background music altogether as a lot of people will find it very annoying especially if it is on a continuous loop.

Flash

Using flash is a great way of providing trendy animation to a site but it is best used sparingly, using too much flash is a sure way to annoy some website visitors.

One reason is that not everyone can see flash as some computers will not have the flash player installed yet, this will result in them seeing nothing on your site.

Mobile users also can not see flash movies, therefore by using too much flash or using flash for your whole site you will be decreasing the number of visitors who can use it.

Flash animation will also take a lot longer to load than text, search engines will not pick up on your content as it will be within a movie and thus your site will almost definitely be near the bottom of the search engine results which will dramatically reduce your sites' visitors.

Images as content

Images should not be used to display content much, you may wish to have images to advertise certain aspects of your site but you really shouldn't use them all the time.

Reasons for this being similar to the last point in that not every user of your website will be able to view images, so therefore if you have important information locked into an image, a visitor without the capability to see the image will just see nothing or a box with a red cross through it.

Images also take longer to load especially on slower connections, so a lot of images may leave your visitor feeling impatient and frustrated.

You will of course use images but use them to make the site attractive not necessary to display content, content in images will not be picked up by the search engines so again your site will not rank to well.

When you do use images make sure you use the alt attribute so that the users without image viewing browsers will be able to make out at least what should have been there.

Pop ups

Don't use pop ups on your website full stop as it will undoubtedly annoy your website visitors and they will probably leave your site without reading or looking at anything probably to never return again.

Navigation

To make the use of your site as smooth and an enjoyable process as possible the navigation menus need to be consistent on every page, meaning they need to be in the exact same place, this way the user knows where they are and can get used to using them.

It is also a good idea to use shortcut links from relevant pages to pages that you know most visitors would usually like to see next.

A sitemap of your website is also another great page to have, this will display to the user all the links to pages on your site, bigger sites with lots of pages must definitely have one of these to avoid visitors getting lost. A link to your sitemap should be visible from every page of your site.