Top 5 Website Blunders

There are a lot of things that can go wrong when it comes to web development, especially when dealing with large projects and short deadlines. This article lists a few common — and often disastrous or embarrassing — errors that could happen to you.

5. Forgetting to Update Nameservers for the Big Launch

More often than not, web development is done on an IP address or alternate domain. When it comes time to launch, this means that nameservers (which determine where a domain is located) will need to be updated. Unfortunately, it may take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours for the internet to reflect the changes. As a result, waiting until the big day is often disastrous as hopeful visitors may not be able to access the website.

4. Glaring Spelling and Grammatical Errors

Web copy is another area which is often not well checked prior to being made live. Big whoops here! Spelling and grammatical errors are two of the biggest ways to tell your visitors to go elsewhere.

3. Links That Go Nowhere

Believe it or not, we have seen many new websites which have links pointing to pages that do not exist. This is probably one of the most annoying features of any website. Even worse, it may negatively affect your search engine ranking.

Fortunately, there is a free tool by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It can be used to recursively check all links throughout your entire website.

2. Forgetting to Allow Search Engines

We build websites for people, but search engines are important too. Being noticed and indexed by search engines could mean the difference between free traffic or a costly marketing campaign. So if you forget everything else, be sure to allow search engines.

If you’re wondering how search engines might be blocked, then you’re probably not at risk. But a typical scenario that might cause this error could be development. During the process of building a websites, some web developers block search engines so that unfinished demo pages and dummy content won’t be indexed. When the website is launched it is very easy to forget to stop blocking search engines.

1. Not Checking for Cross-Browser Compatibility.

If you are a web developer, you’ve likely chosen Firefox or Safari as your browser of choice. And if you are like most of us, you probably stay FAR FAR AWAY from Internet Explorer. After all, it is slow, insecure, and inconsistent.

Unfortunately, almost half of web surfers today still use Internet Explorer. This means that you cannot only develop websites for Firefox, Safari, and Opera. You also need to employ all sorts of tedious and painful hacks to make your website work in Internet Explorer as well.

Yep, that’s right; you have no choice in the matter. Internet Explorer is literally your ball and chain. And if you attempt to ignore it, you’ll be committing one huge blunder!