1. Do Not Hide Text On Your Site

In the past, you could get away with making certain text the same color as the background of your site and load it with content rich information for search engines. Bet you can’t read the next line without highlighting it!

This will get you into trouble with Google…remember Google is your friend!

Now, if the evolving Google bot finds this on your site, you will be penalized in the Google search rankings. It’s not worth it!

2. Do Not Use Images to Represent Important Information

There are just some elements on your site that have to be represented with text. For instance, a footer that contains your street address and contact information. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. use this text to display your address and location when you are indexed in searches. As smart as those bots are, they can’t interpolate an image…yet.

3. Don’t Put Music on a Site Without Controls

Nothing is more aggravating then going to a website and having some music continuously play while you peruse the site. If you have good reason to placing music on your site…I mean good reason, then you should at least include a simple button to turn off the sound.

4. Do NOT Use Tables to Layout Your Site

This is a thing of the past, and still wasn’t the best practice in formatting websites. Style sheets with CSS3 are all you need to ever layout a website now. Especially with everything moving to tablets and mobile searching, a fluid layout for your site is a must these days.

5. Do Not Use Too Large of Images

While the internet is only getting faster for everyone, the use of large images can really slow down a website. People are impatient as ever these days, and they want their information immediately. The longer that your site takes to load, the less time a visitor will stay on your site.  Also, the longer the site takes to load, the worse your site will perform in SEO.

These are just some of the very basics to consider when you start designing your website. You can see our company’s website, Three Point Oh!, which has come a long way since my first design. Let me know what you think on one of our social handles facebook, twitter, google+.