Ten Totally Uncool Web Site Bloopers to Avoid*

1. Spelling mistakes - Spelling mistakes look unprofessional, and they annoy people!

2. Broken links - Check for and correct broken links. Also, the Web changes all the time, so you'll need to check your links to other Web sites occasionally to make sure the pages still exist.

3. Unlinked pages - Don't leave your visitors stranded! When you put pages on the Web, remember to add links to the other pages on your Web site.

4. Bandwidth behemoths - People don't like waiting more than 15 or 20 seconds for a page to download. Too many images, sounds, or pages of text can weigh a page down.

5. Permanent construction zones - Sure, you can put an "under construction" sign on a page when you don't have time to finish it today. But if you leave the page unfinished for weeks or months, visitors will stop coming back.

6. Pages that just don't work - Make sure to test all your pages in your own Web browser and as many others as you have available.

7. Endlessly scrolling pages - If you publish reports and other long documents to your Web site, don't make your visitors scroll too much. It's a good idea to create bookmarks and provide links throughout the document so visitors won't have to scroll for more than a page and a half.

8. Frameset orphans - If you use frames on your Web site, be nice to visitors who may accidentally stumble onto a page that belongs in a frameset. This may confuse people because framed pages often don't make any sense without the rest of the frames. You can create links on all your pages that people can click to view the pages as you intended.

9. Web page circuses - Special effects, animations, text marquees, background sounds, and multimedia are way cool. But gaudy pages with too many dancing and singing elements can make people dizzy! Limit your fun stuff to one or two elements per page.

10. Unreadable pages - Tiny fonts, insufficient contrast between the background and text colors, cluttered layouts, and other factors can make Web pages impossible to read. Ask some of your coworkers or friends to take a look at your pages before publishing them to the whole wide world.