A couple of weeks ago I posted about 4 things your website should be doing. However there are a lot of things your website shouldn't be doing and here are just 4 of them.
1 Use Flash
It still surprises me the amount of website that are still built using flash. Now I have nothing against flash itself, though it can lead to unnecessary site size as all your content is downloaded at once which increase overall page load time (bad for SEO). Flash as poses some security risks as it's seen as “safe” by your visitors computer as runs locally on their machine which makes it easier for malware or virus to bypass some of the built in security features.
2 Sliders
Now by sliders I mean those banner rotations you see everywhere these days. Now I'm just going to clarify here, I'm not saying don't use them cause they are good at getting lots of information in a small space, but think about the number of banners and time between each in the rotation.
That said a general rule here is to keep it to a minimum with the number of banners in each to about 3 and the whole rotation shouldn't take more than a few seconds. Otherwise your visitors will already have left the page before seeing them.
3 Inconsistency
The last thing you want is when your visitors are browsing your website when they go from one page to another and there is a drastically different layout, font or colour scheme (I'm excluding campaign pages here which for some reasons might require this to be the case). You really want your visitors to feel like they haven't left your website when navigating on it. So changing the layout and fonts etc can cause confusion and make them feel like they've navigated away from your site.
4 Images and infographics
This might come as a shock to some, but to a search engine (such as Google) and screen readers they can see images they focus on the image title and alternative (alt) text. Now infographics and images are good they provide some liveliness to a page and can be interactive for users. It is the lack of supporting text around them that's the issue. You need this extra text to be able to gain that all important SEO benefit.
Trying to avoid these 4 things can help improve your visitors experience and also improve your website's performance.
