Twenty Bad Ideas

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  • 3 Comments
  •       256 words

I’ve decided to fire up a quick blog post highlighting twenty things which, in my opinion, make a bad website. Obviously there will be a lot more and that is where you, the readers, come in.

I’ll get the ball rolling with my twenty.

  • Copyright date or the last modified date on pages not being updated.
  • Lots of 404 pages
  • A high bounce rate (surfers having to use their back buttons and selecting another result.)
  • A lot of duplicate content.
  • Whois info for the domain is the same as other domains previously penalised or banned.
  • Domains previously used for spam or that are blacklisted.
  • Use of/links to affiliate programs that are known scams.
  • Massive numbers of incoming links from link farms.
  • Stagnation of the site.
  • Excessively long URL’s
  • A high percentage of affiliate links versus that of regular outbound links.
  • No / very few outbound and inbound links.
  • All inbound links are to homepage only.
  • Outbound links to spam sites.
  • Spelling errors.
  • Lack of interest from social bookmarking sites.
  • MySQL or PHP errors in the pages.
  • No published contact address, email address or phone number.
  • Contains unrelated subjects (a site that reviews SEO and tries to sell something unrelated.)
  • Profanity or explicitly adult language on a non-adult site.

Now it’s your turn.

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  • Who I am

    My name is Jack Osborne and I am a Glasgow–based designer and writer. You should follow me on Twitter.

3 Responses to “Twenty Bad Ideas”

  1. Stephanie Clark says:
    November 19, 2008 at 10:56 pm

    Here’s another few!

    21. Serif fonts. Just dont.
    22. Unclear menu structure.
    23. Lack of page titles.
    24. I am going to emphasise on the lack of contact details!! This is a must on websites. And there should be a clear link to the contact page in the main menu!

  2. Jack Osborne says:
    November 20, 2008 at 11:56 am

    Hi Steph brilliant to hear from you! Hope the job and things are going well :)

    23 – lack of page titles. I’m still surprised at the amount of times I’ve been on a site and looked up to see a blank title bar. It seems like basic stuff and it’s not exactly new practice.

    24 – I’m actually guilty of this one but hadn’t really thought of adding it into the address bar until you mentioned it. As for contact details, I’ve tried to incorporate hCard and some microformats throughout the site but it’s tricky stuff and as yet the hCard still isn’t working.

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    Once again, it is really good to hear from you.

    Hope you’ll come back from time to time and leave some of your insight, it’s good to get the opinions of the up and coming web designers/ developers.

  3. George says:
    June 18, 2009 at 12:41 pm

    Very interesting… thanks.