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The door to the web design industry is open like none other. With the skill levels of ‘designers’ varying to such a great degree, mistakes happen that are possibly harming the productivity of your website.

These are 5 Web Design mistakes that can diminish your chances of building a successful website.

1. Using the code exported from Photoshop or another Image Editing Program.
   The typical code you end up with is full of nested tables and tons of image spacers that eat up valuable file size. Not only will your site take longer to download, you may flat out ruin your chances for high rankings in search engines. Instead, use Adobe’s slice tool to select only the portions of the graphic that you need to complete the design. There’s no need to build an entire column out of graphics when one small slice used in conjunction with a CSS background repeat could take care of it. Saving a great chunk of file size and giving the Search Engines less code to crawl through.
2. Defining a list of Javascript or CSS Styles in the header
   I can almost guarantee you that if you open up the source code on 10 random websites, at least 4 of them will have a plethora of code at the top defining Javascript or CSS styles. Consider the amount of source code a search engine robot has to crawl through before it gets to the actual relevant information on your site. By then, your ‘relevant’ information may not seem so ‘relevant’ to a search engine robot or spider. Put your CSS definitions and other function definitions in external files and simply include the path to them in your header. Makes your code cleaner, cuts your file size and makes things easy for the robots and spiders. Face it, the majority of traffic comes via search engines. We might as well make it as easy as possible for them to list our site.
3. Going Over the Top
   That is the simplest way to put number 3. Understand that your visitors are not coming to your website to see what cool graphics and flashy designs you have. Your visitors are coming looking for an answer to their problem. Flash accents and a professional graphic appeal are definitley great. However, don’t let that get in the way of the true purpose of the site - serving your customers needs
4. Walking With Your Eyes Closed in the Dark
   What is it that you want your site to do? So often the biggest setback for a websites success is due to a lack of focus. What results do you expect to see? Get a clear focus on what you want your site to accomplish and build on that.
5. Where am I? Where am I?
   Although this comes in at number 5, it is far from last in critical web design mistakes. There has to be a clear, and easy to use, method of navigating your website. As soon as a visitor gets confused they will leave for a website that they can navigate freely. If you have a large site, you need to add a site search feature. Smaller sites a site search will only be a pain in the neck for your visitors, consider adding a Site Map that displays an unordered list of your navigation structure. Not only will this give your visitors and easy way to find what they are looking for; but it will also make sure the search engines are able to find, and index, every page of your site.