This article is intended to show up some of the bad things you may well practice as a designer. These things can potentially hurt your career, and your own website. This article is meant to address a few of the issues you as a developer may be sucked into, and if there's enough good feedback, I'll write a followup.

What is bad practice?

So first, let's clear up.. what even is bad practice?

Bad practice is using things - be it out-dated technologies like HTML or confusing, silly things like inline-CSS - which hinder the running of a site, and therefore ruin the image of the business or individual behind it.

That's.. wonderful.

I know. There are a great many things which get in the way of a website if the designer/coder isn't experienced. They will often choose the easy way out, and this isn't the way to build a site. You should strive to make your site the best it can be! So does using silly things which will confuse your audience and slow your site down make sense? No.

Frames & iframes

Frames have been around for a long time. Back in the 90's, splitting a users view of your website into different sections was all the rage. It allowed for simple separation of content, and it looked pretty cool.

But, it's 2006. Now, with the advent of technologies like AJAX, and increased awareness of usability and the necessity for web standards, frames cause more problems than they're worth. Why?

Search engines hate them. While it's possible to hack things so that robots can crawl a framed site, it's still more work on your part, and it's still a hack. You can tell your robots.txt file to not index sub-pages, or use JavaScript to disallow viewing of a child without the frameset.. but come on.

As for bookmarking.. well.. When you bookmark a framed site, you'll be bookmarking the home page of the site - the default state of the frameset. That's probably not the page a user wanted. A bookmark is meant to lead directly to something - frames break that.

Printing your sites content is a huge thing which designers miss out on. People still like to print things off! It's easier for some than reading on a monitor. I expect this article to be printed out, in fact. Most browsers require you to 'activate' a frame by selecting it before you can print the content inside it. That's unnecessary confusion!

Remember people using screen readers! Iframes sometimes take focus (become activated) when their content has finished loading. If your visitor using a screen reader hits your site, they'll be thrown by that, because it will then start reading that. What if it's your navigation in an iframe? Think about it. Confusing pages get less traffic.

People don't want to be confused.

HTML vs XHTML

There's been a lot of talk about the switch between using HTML 4.01 and XHTML. (Which, for the record, stands for eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) Why should you bother?

The internet today has grown, and reached a point where site owners are from all walks of life - bored 10 year olds to aging war veterans. These people may not know the specifics of what they're doing, and to them it isn't important. But you - the aspiring professional designer - are creating sites for businesses and clients who want high quality and compatibility!

XHTML consists of all the elements in HTML 4.01 combined with the syntax of XML.

XML is a language designed to describe data, and it has to be 'well written'. Tags must be lowercase, properly nested etc (Read more about that), and so must XHTML! Therefore, you end up with a well-formed page, backwards-compatible and ready for the future. People don't only read online content on a computer anymore - you've got mobile phones and PDA's to deal with now!

So be prepared. Use standards - use XHTML.

Splash pages
I'm sure I'll get insulted for this one. Splash pages! Again, back in the 90's they were brilliant! You could show off your designing talents with a snazzy centred image, with "Click to enter" or "Enter SITENAME".

Don't.

Let's take a look at the most successful sites on the internet. (As according to Alexa.com)

Yahoo.com. Go there. Go on. Google.com. Go. MSN.com. There too.

See any splash pages? No. They deliver their content instantly. As soon as you get there (On the MSN and Yahoo portals at least) you're hit with content. As in my last article - it's well laid out and clear, and there's certainly lots of content there. I bet it's new too.

Splash pages just slow down your visitor from getting to your content! People don't want to be slowed down. You know how impatient you are when you really want something, and a site loads furiously slow? Why assume your visitors are going to be any different?

Splash pages are usually a waste of time - so don't waste your time, let alone your visitors. They're going to be the ones making you rich and famous.

In Closing

I enjoyed writing this article - allowed me to vent a little steam. I'm sure I'll get flamed about the splashes, but.. I'm prepared for that. I hope you enjoyed it too. I hope you don't fall into the trap! There are tempting things out there - we all know how enticing a dandy little image can be saying "Click me. Go on." can be, but think about your visitors.

Feedback is, as always, warmly welcomed via the forum, email or MSNM. If you want more - just ask!