Common Web Design Mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes I see is the constant moving of pages. Renaming a page or changing the url is a fatal mistake. It takes years to get all of a websites pages listed in the search indexes. Moving the page is like changing your phone number after advertising in the yellow pages.

If you move a page to a sub directory or change the page extension from htm to html or something dynamic like asp or cgi, you might as well just delete the page.

Any search presense you had is now flushed down the toilet. The page may be indexed in the searches, but when someone tries to get to it they get a 404 Page Not Found message instead.

You would not move your store and lose all of your customers. But people move pages, change pages from contact.html to Contact_Us.html. You might as well hide the store under a rock.

The search engine comes back looking for the page and its not there. You just lost google points. They consider this an invalid page and begin removing counless pages from their database. In their words, the site is too volitile and is not stable enough to include in their database.

This is because their database is slow and cumbersome. They want to include pages that have staying power. Pages that will be there when they deliver search results to their clients. Since yours was not, they tag your site as bogus or less usefull than others.

It's a costly mistake. But I see this every single day.

The affect is much greater when a site is totally rebuilt and using new programing like asp or aspx. Then the entire sites urls have been wiped from the internet radar. If the site has been up for a few years, the designer has just committed business suicide.

If you plan a big upgrade. Do some research. Don't take our word for it. You will find people that have done just that to bring their business up to speed with technology only to find they took a big step back in their profits.