Contributed by Klaus Black
When designing a web site for the first time, it's easy to get carried away with unnecessary extras. Try to remember that simplicity is best when it comes to web design. What follows are the top five Web Design mistakes beginners tend to make.
Beginners in web design often make easily avoidable mistakes. One of those is the use of a very distracting and busy background image or bright background color. It is already hard on the eyes to read on the web, don't make it more difficult with overbearing graphics. Another common error in web design is the over use of animated graphics. Yes, some of these web animations are very cool, but they can be distracting and take time to load, so try to keep them to a minimum.
This leads me to another web design faux pas: images used without permission. People often assume that any graphic they find on the web is in the public domain and free for anyone to download and incorporate into their own design. This is simply not true. There are images on the web that are free to use, but there are specific web sites that offer those images. You can go to any search engine and look up "free clip art" to find those sites.
Another mistake that beginners in web design often make, is not knowing what type of graphics file to use. The most common graphics types are .jpg (or .jpeg) and .gif. If you use one when you should have used the other, it could result in a loss of quality and a bad looking web site. Gif files are mostly used for animated images and also for things like line drawings and solid color cartoon-type artwork. Using a .jpg for that type of thing can make the image develop unattractive blurry lines called "artifacts." Jpeg files are used mostly for photographic images.
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