You just finished creating your new website. It’s awesome right? Maybe it is, but there is a good chance it isn’t. Here are my top five reasons good sites go bad.

Poor Planning and Functionality

Take a look at a css gallery. All of the sites featured have “eye-pleasing” layouts. If you break down many, if not most, of the websites, you’ll find that the structure completely lacks functionality. For instance, I just opened up CSS Mania. The second most recent website added to their weblog section uses images for their main navigation. For those of you who didn’t already know, images shouldn’t be used for the main navigation of a website. There is a chance that the user may have images disabled in their browser, but more commonly, if the image doesn’t load, whoever is taking the time to view the website will be completely lost, and probably leave (never to return). Text should always be used as the main source of navigation.

Afterwards, I took a look at the next website. This one has its navigation in the bottom right corner of the page. This is the worst possible location for navigation! A study by Sav Shrestha and Kelsi Lenz, shows how users typically view web pages in an “F-Shape”. The left and top areas are viewed the most heavily. That’s why it makes sense to have the navigation and content over towards that area.

Here are a few other things to be careful of before I move on to the next reason your site isn’t good.

• Make sure your text is readable, and that you have enough whitespace in between lines.
• Break up your content into chunks. It makes it seem less intimidating.
• Colors are important. Here is a good guide to choosing a color scheme.
• Your site can be functional and have a nice design. You just have to find the right balance.

Falling into Trends

Ugh! This one bothers me the most. Everyone seems to be falling into this “Web 2.0″ trend, and quite frankly most people CANNOT pull this off. I don’t want to discredit any bad “web 2.0″ sites, but here are some good ones: Veerle’s blog and N.Design Studio. I think Elliot Jay Stocks sums it up the best right here:

Mixed Results in Different Browsers

I think this title speaks for itself. The main problem is with Internet Explorer (like usual). Many sites do not even function in IE7. This is inexcusable. It is especially easy to hack your site to work in IE with conditional tags. You can load a whole different style sheet with IE hacks in it through this code:

<!–[if IE]>
<style type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”ie.css” />
<![endif]–>

Of course this will bulk up your code a bit, but consistence between browsers is usually of higher concern than the size of your code. Also, if you don’t have many browsers on your computer, FEAR NOT! Browsershots.org is your perfect solution! It takes screenshots for you in any browser you ask it to. So you now have no excuses ;).

Load Times

This is just frustrating. I remember hearing once that the average person waits 10 seconds for a page to load before clicking away. I think thats insane! If the website isn’t loaded within 5 seconds, I’ve already clicked the back button. The worst part about long load times is that usually they are for completely useless things. For example:

• Intros.
• Useless flash objects. (I’ve come to the conclusion that 99.99% of the time you don’t even need to use flash. It can be avoided.)
• Useless AJAX widgets.
• Really large images.
• Poorly written code.

The list goes on and on, but I’ll stop there. Every single one of those things can be easily avoided, and should actually not be used.

My conclusion

Despite my pessimism, I believe the web is headed in a positive direction. Just steer clear of these pitfalls, and you should be just fine