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This page is a compiled list of the most common things people do, or don't do, to their websites which makes them unappealing to the people visiting them. Most of the time there are ways around it so you can keep what you've done, but in some cases, they should be completely removed from your site.

Background Music
By background music, we mean music that loads with the website, not sound clips or short effects. A lot of people listen to music (from CDs or MP3s) while they're on-line, or like to take a break at work and surf for a few minutes. In either case, having unwanted background music play is a major annoyance, and will usually result in the closing of that website immediately.


	*How To Fix It* You don't necessarily have to eliminate the background music, but do offer visitors the choice of whether to hear it or surf without it.

Flashing and Moving Objects
Having 5 things spinning, flashing, or scrolling on the page is a major annoyance, and will usually result in the closing of that website immediately.


	*How To Fix It* Limit moving, flashing, and scrolling objects to only 1 per page.

Pop-up Windows
Every major website has pop-up windows for advertising purposes. But what they don't do, or at least shouldn't do, is display them in front of their website, forcing you to close the window just to see the content of their site. So if you must use a pop-up window, make sure it loads the pop-up behind the main website. Limit the pop-up windows to one, and it is highly recommended that you do NOT open more pop-up windows when they close a window. Something to think about: People hate multiple autospawning popup windows, so why would they buy anything from them?

JPEG & GIF Compression
There are still a lot of people on dial-up, so it's still important to condense the sizes of your files as much as possible to ensure a website loads quickly.

How To Fix It
In Photoshop they have included a tool for saving images ready for the web. Under File, look for Save for Web. Using this, you can view your images while adjusting the JPEG quality or the bit plane (number of colors) for GIFs. In most cases, you will get great looking JPEGs at a small file size on quality 6. For GIFs, it depends on if you're using a photograph or a cartoon-like image. For photos, you would probably want 64 or 128 colors, but with cartoon-like images you may only need as few as 16 colors.

In Paint Shop Pro by Jasc you would use Image Optimizers for JPG, GIF, or PNG graphics. To Optimize your graphics open them in Paint Shop Pro, and then Click File, Click Export, and then choose which type of graphic you would like to optimize. You can usually compress a 300x200 graphic to around 20K without a huge difference in quality. Without optimization this same 300x200 graphic could be as large as 100K causing a 5 times longer download time.

Long Download Times
This can be caused by a number of different things. Most of the time it's because of too many images. These images can be condensed, but having too many will still slow down the load-time of your site considerably. Another common cause is flash. A lot of people don't realize how large flash files can become. Poor quality web hosting may also cause slow load time, so you usually get what you pay for. Many cheap web hosting companies have outdated servers with hundred of web sites on the same server.

How To Fix It
If you have multiple images you want to use for one page, the best thing to do is choose one or maybe two to show on that page, then include a link to another page containing smaller, highly compressed images (commonly known as thumbnails), which link to the full-sized images.
For flash files, it may not be possible to condense the file size, so you should either give people the choice to view your site with or without flash, or include a "Loading" bar so people know how long they will have to wait. People are much more willing to wait for your site to load if they know how long it will take.
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Text on Solid Backgrounds
This is very common among new web developers. What happens is they find a picture or a background with many different solid colors and tile it on their websites. It may look nice, but in most cases the background will stand out too much and the text will be hard to read. In some cases a few of the background colors will match the text, rendering it completely unreadable.


	*How To Fix It* You should choose a background with one color, or a texture with a few close shades of one color. The text's color should be the opposite shade of the background's. For example, if your background is a dark blue, you should use a very light color for your text, such as light blue or white.

Not Copyrighting Your Work
This is very often overlooked by web developers. If you value your Web site or literary composition, and the hard work and original ideas that went into it, get the protection it deserves.


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If you have any programming tips, information, or scripts you would like to add to the site e-mail it to webmaster@webhostingwit.com