If you’re looking to design and publish your very own web site for the first time, there are many potential pitfalls that you’ll want to avoid.
The following are three of the worst:
1. Don’t make the site into your personal soapbox. Yes, you have a web site now. Yes, it can be viewed by anyone in the world. No, this does not mean that you should slap up posts about whatever political or social cause you believe in if the site has nothing to do with that subject otherwise. You would be irritated if you went to a site expecting to view 3D modeling tutorials and instead were bombarded with news quotes on feminism, wouldn’t you? Change “3D modeling tutorials” and “feminism” to whatever other words you like, the answer is the same; no, you wouldn’t enjoy that. Your viewers feel the same.
2. Don’t make the site just to make it. While some sites make pointlessness the actual point (Pointlesssites.com will, a-hem, point you in the direction of many of these if you’re curious), most people create a web site with a particular purpose in mind. If you want a web site just to have one, keep in mind that it will be as unmemorable as everybody else’s sites that follow the same train of thought. How many web sites have you loved and visited repeatedly that didn’t have any particular theme or reason for existing?
3. Don’t make it a “junk pile of awesome.” While it’s true that there are insane amounts of neat free widgets, background images, fonts, banners, .gif animations and more out there, if you grab as many as possible like a kid in a candy store and add them all to your page, congratulations, you’ve created a “junk pile of awesome.” Heaping your site with gadgets and animations and other image-heavy files is overwhelming for the viewer and for the bandwidth. Try to restrain yourself. Please.