Gotchas
Standards Compliant: Are you a public institution or retailer who has to consider all levels of human interaction? Your web site needs to be accessible, or you might face legal action. For more on the laws governing accessibility, please see this web site. A truly section 508 standards compliant web site will most likely be very usable, benefitting not only those with disabilities but those without. Sort of like wheelchair ramps. Sometimes I just don't feel like taking the stairs. Especially if I'm on a bicycle.
Search Engine Myths: So go ahead, delete all your photos, flash files, just have plain old text with key words and phrases that repeat every third sentence.
"SEO": If your entire web site was done in photoshop, exported as slices that have links to other photoshop files, you should talk to one. But just keep everything that can be construed as a word in text, especially navigational links and important words somebody might search on, and you'll be fine. If you really need your site to come up first, find an SEO with a good reputation and make sure your expectations are set ahead of time...
You can spend some money with Google and pay to have your link come up first. Or advertise the heck out of your domain with print, tv and radio. Other than that, don't rely on the web as your sole source of information for people to know about you. Write an article for a journal in your field, post a how-to on a related web site; in other words, spread your own word. Don't rely on the giant search engine spider.
Hyphenation: When to hyphenate a word so that part of it appears on one line and part of it appears the next? NEVER. Got that? Repeat after me: when to use a hyphen to break a word on the next line? Say it out loud. "NEVER". There is ONE exception. If you run a newspaper and it has very narrow columns and all the text is justified so that it looks better in all those skinny columns... then you can break words with hyphens. You also should never justify your type. It will create weird white rivers running down the page. But most of you will never be putting together a newspaper with narrow columns, so you don't get to use hyphens or justified type. Just DON'T do it.
Plural and the Apostrophe: Sometimes I think I'm the only person bothered by the misuse and abuse of the little apostrophe, but alas, I am not: gentle reader, please consider taking a look at this web site. The most frequent abuse occurs when denoting a plural. Just remember this: Apostrophes are NEVER ever used to denote plurals! (And yes I'm aware that one of my own sites has this problem - Buy CD's - it says, but the site has since been turned over to an unresponsive client.)
Moving parts: Is it no coincidence that advertisers use moving and flashing graphics to get your attention? Our eyes are very sensitive to movement, especially movement in the periphery. This sensitivity can alert us to a charging bull or speeding vehicle, but it can drive us away from a web page that has repetitive motion. Unless there is a movie that has been purposefully chosen to play, avoid moving parts.
The MAC test: I am an avid Mac user, and some web sites are apparently developed without ever testing anything but Internet Explorer on a PC. Even a look at a site on an PC in Firefox should give a good idea how a Mac user will see your site. The most common Mac problem is the size of text: Macs tend to render text slightly smaller. If a font size of 8 or below is specified, it could be illegible on a Mac. Of course the reverse is true. IE 7 can make an absolute mess of things if IE 6 hacks were incorporated to make a page look like it does in Firefox. Every site I publish is tested on, at the minimum, Mac Firefox, PC Firefox, and PC Internet Explorer. Here is a handy site to see what at least part of your screen will look like in different versions of IE: netrenderer.
Background color: I set my web browser's color to some lovely shade of purple or yellow just to make certain I've specified a background color to the web pages I've designed. My goal is for all users to have basically the same experience with a web site, and although it's probably a very small proportion of viewers who change their web page background color setting, it is just one more method of ensuring readability and consistency.
Text size: I mention this a lot because it is a real bother to come to a web site where I really do want to read the information there, but the text is rendered in such a small size it's nearly illegible. One must not blame the Flash application for use of such small fonts. It's like colors. Just because something is available (in this case, small fonts for Flash) does not mean it should be used. For HTML pages, if fonts are specified using an "em" size rather than a "pt" or "px" size, the text will be enlargeable via the web browser menu. If, for layout purposes, the text needs to stay at an exact size, pt or px is fine. As long as it's at least 10 pt.
Flash player: Flash has grown in its more recent releases, allowing much easier development of sophisticated web pages and applications. The web browser that does not have the latest player must be redirected to acquire it, or the experience will be far from what was intended.
