Few don’ts of web page designing (updated)

Often browsing the web I come across pages which makes me exclaim in horror. I thought I would share them with you…

Things to avoid in web pages (in no particular order):

Icon only menu (with no other help)
It may appear obvious to the creators of the web-page the meaning of the images in the menu. However to others its just bunch of icons which can mean a lot of things, more so when non-standard icons are used. Pictures do speak a thousand words but that doesn’t apply to icons!
It is clearly a bad design to have icon-only navigation without any other help, even baloon help is better than nothing. Case in point: https://www.alt.lu/WellCAD/WellCAD.htm

Flash only entry page & Flash only navigation
I can see why certain sites would like to have Flash introduction on their entry page, however personally I would never do it because I think it distracts from the main content.

What is however inaapropriate to force the users to get the Flash plugin to view the page by providing no other entry-point to the contents. Doing so is a sure way to turn off a significant percentage of your potential customers. Consider the fact that browsers like Firefox (which has recently become very popular as a result of non-ending stream of critical IE defects and government advisory against using IE) do not come with Flash plugin installed.

There should always be a alternative non-Flash page, more so for the entry page.
See: https://corporate.ddsl.net/ or https://www.ddsl.net/ for examples of Flash only entry page.

The same is applicable for Flash only navigation page. Yes they look cool, however by sparing yourself the extra effort to provide a HTML alternative you are liable to lose many valuable customers.

The same advice goes for any plugin technology based entry page. However as it stands Flash developers appears to be the primary offenders

Identical Titles across website
I have seen many professionally designed site have identical titles across pages (obviously templatized). This is a big mistake. Firstly titles are very much valued by google for getting keywords with higher weights. Also many users want to save webpages for later viewing. Having an effective title allows them to easily find out the pages later. On the other hand identical title causes more pain in saving as they are forced to manually type in a title for the page.

Avoid Fancy Content Producers
You have all seen sites where moving your mouse over a link displays relevant content about the mouse location. An extreme which I observed today was data for the page was being displayed only when the mouse was moved to relevant sub-sections of the page. And the data was fetched from the server everytime.
This will definitely hinder any ability to save the page and view later. Unless that is what you are looking for my suggestion would be to use such eye-candies in addition to normal content and not as a replacement.

IE only pages
It seems that some developers forget to test their site on any non-IE browsers. That definitely makes a bad impression when viewed with non-IE browsers. This is specially true for products and service description pages where you are trying to impress your potential customers.
And remember many CXO’s love to work on their Mac laptops!
Nowadays the minimal list should at least be:
1. IE 6.x on Windows NT 4 , 2000 & XP & Mac OS X
2. FireFox on Windows NT 4 , 2000 & XP & Linux*
3. Mozilla on Windows NT 4 , 2000 & XP
4. Safari on OS X
5. Konqueror on Linux
6. Opera 7.x on Windows NT 4 , 2000 & XP & Linux*

*In Linux the key OS distribution is RedHat.

And above all list the browsers your product have been tested with.

Thanks for the suggestions. Keep it coming. In fact I want to know how I can shorten the list.

Notes on changes as a result of suggestions:
1. Added Opera for Linux & Windows Platform as pointed by pkmk & Lars G. Svensson.
2. Removed KDE which was a mistake as pointed out by Adam Kruszewski .
3. Didn’t add Lynx or Link (as suggested by John D. Mitchell) because from all published browser usage trends they comprise a very small percentage of users on the web (in the range of 0.1 to o.o1 %). So the cost-benefit ratio may not be acceptable.
4. As you can see this is not a all encompassing list. The purpose is to address over 90-95% of the web users(not 60% as with only IE). In fact I am looking at how to shorten the list.

Content-less wonders
I was reading about BPM (Business Process Management) developments. It is amazing to see so many articles and analysis without absolutely any content. It feels like even sentences were copied & pasted from other sources. And then I couldn’t even take back one line of summarized knowledge from them! It is easy to speak in general terms, which can be used for almost any context, without knowing anything about a subject. In reality they mean nothing. Chances are people will avoid a site forever after seeing a couple of such pages.
Similarly avoid over-hyped content. Text like “amazing”, “awesome”, “will blow your mind off” (and other such Amway-speak) is a sure-fire way of getting rid of visitors to your site.

Looking forward for your additions/alterations to this list…