Early Mistakes You Make As Amateur Web Designer

Kindly share your experience. Your blunders in the past. Let's learn together.

 

It seems that early on you want to make your websites colorful and busy with no regards to functionality and ease of use. You just want to put everythingn you know or just found out into the site because you CAN not because it NEEDS to be there. It is hard to pick a style and leave it, at least it is for me, but the ones that stick are usually the simplest and easiest to manage.

 

I assumed that green was going to look good on every screen. It doesn't.

 

LOL... I used yellow text on dark red background for a professional website ...

 

Colours seem to stuff up a lot of people. If in doubt, put black text on a while/pale grey background and colour the boarders. Rainbows look good to 7 year-old girls, but probably not to your target market.

 

Animated gifs! ARGH!

 

What I see on a lot of newbie pages is: classitis and divitis, and multiple little images, poorly optimised, .jpgs by default, etc. making the page much larger than it needs to be.

My biggest mistakes/problems were: not understanding floats!!! And thus clearing them improperly or not at all (oo!)

Not checking/testing enough. At first I thought checking in FF and IE6 were good enough... to see your page die at the hands of Opera or Konqueror can really point out actual code flaws that both IE and FF account for (and compentsate for).

Overthinking my code was another problem. I've probably re-wrote-while-writing my pages serveral times for each page, because as I learned more I could see ways to really simplify/make efficient my code.

Not thinking of 800x600 as a valid screen resolution. Boy was I wrong! I ended up stuck with two pages that are NOT 800px friendly and when I realised that, my only compensation I could do was to make sure that those people only have to move the horizontal scrollbar ONCE and can read the rest with just downscrolling. Even as computer monitors increase in size and resolution, smaller, portable machines are increasing in popularity.

The biggest thing I've learned so far though is that listening to Finnish metal is really good for writing HTML. : )

 

I use a lime green and super large fonts on my first web design...
It sucks when i see the results

 

Trusting other people to get things done on time.
Trusting myself with a colour scheme (i'm working on this...).
Tables.
Bad quality images.

 

I was into the entire "matrix" green text / black background combo.

I then stated to nest, nest and nest table's to control layout, basically over complicating code.

When I learnt to use HTML + CSS properly I then still bloated all the code, and i guess i got a major infection of,

LOL.

 

Wanting more design over functionality.

 

In no particular order....

Frontpage
Over use of tables
Not embracing CSS fast enough
Not embracing notepad++ fast enough
Not embracing the only 2 useful dreamweaver features which are site management with a live server for minor changes and find/replace in an entire folder.
Not using image maps (which rock)
Switching from MSSQL to MySql (although MySql is much improved these days)
Thinking every website should be various shades of white, grey and blue.
Not using images - boring websites.
Running an FTP client that supports tabbed browsing and deleting an entire website in error with no backup copy.

 

using "ain't it neat" technlogies before you understand them, or at least understand when it's appropriate to use them and when they are just bloat. You see this with javascript all the time with people cutting and pasting snippets from dynamic drive... now that AJAX is here, it's only gotten worse with even professionals making the same stupid mistakes they seven years ago when DHTML was all the rage and ten years ago when FRAMES were a huge innovation. I know, I was on the DHTML bandwagon for a good while because it let me reduce the size of my page code 50% or more - then I learned that if you write clean semantic markup using CSS for styling, you can write code that's MORE lean, easier to maintain and accessable to everyone.

Flash also falls into that category. Bloated and slow, it REALLY needs to be reserved for use on things like video playback and games - and REALLY needs to NOT be used on presentational elements or worse, 'basic functionality' like menus. I'm REALLY glad I never fell into that trap, lord knows I almost considered it when I first started playing around with the idea of dropdown menus.

 

You are kidding on those, right? Image maps are accessability failures from hell, and don't even get me STARTED about using anything M$ on a SERVER. (Windows is for desktops, *nix is for servers, and NEVER shall the 'twain meet)

 

I though that web 2 meant the use of a lot of colors..

Some of the first designs I made were horrible

 

Early mistakes.. using Dreamweaver (even if it was code view), relying on only Firefox 2, not educating myself via w3.org

 

I think relying on any wysiwyg qualifies for this thread - be it frontpage, dreamweaver, hotMetal, visual page pro... they all generate crap code, and as I keep telling people the only thing you can learn from them is how NOT to write a web page.

Hell, when I started out, I was using Netscape Composer...

 

Hell, when I stared out, I was using WORD WEB.

Now i open up the source of one of those pages and the term 'wtf' comes out in many forms.

 

just some thinking, will avoid you early mistakes

 

but people learn from experience