1) Your users can’t use it without an FAQ or manual

If you have to give your app a walkthrough with new users, it’s not doing it’s job very well. Applications need to be intuitive – it should be completely obvious to all users what your application does, and how they do what they need to do on it. Pimping your features is fine – that’s a given, but you’ve got to make them user friendly and obvious.

2) It’s slow

Guess what, speed matters. If having 10 concurrent users maxes out your server, you’re not winning – you’re losing.

3) You ignore social media

You need an invite process which includes twitter, facebook etc etc. Make it easy for your users to pimp your application, post links to delicious, digg or reddit. People love to share, and people trust friend’s recommendations – so if you’re not facilitating this, you’re not going to attract any new visitors.

4) Your signup process has more than one screen

I hate signing up to any applications, but when I do, I don’t want to answer 10 million questions. Just get the stuff you need, email address and password should do it. Pretty much anything else can be added later… think about it.

5) You use too much flash

Flash websites were a fad 3+ years ago, they look pretty, but heck are they a resource hog! Flash has it’s place, to complement your application where necessary – say to generate charts or animations – not to be the complete experience.

6) Google lists your app on page 16 even with a same name search

Search engine optimization is easy, it’s not some holy grail that cannot be found… Simple META tags are your friends, use the title attribute to name everything within your app – and don’t use meaningless names for DIVS etc. Think about keywords that mean something to your app, and use them – liberally!

7) You use big fonts

Sorry, being bigger doesn’t mean you’re being clever. Big fonts have their place, but not when it takes up half a page for the title. Reel it back in, I know web 2.0 loves the big font, but it’s annoying to users.

8 ) You use animated gifs

No, just no. Animated gifs were the love child of the internet era 1998. They look pretty crappy nowdays, 256 colours just doesn’t cut it anymore. Plus, making something move doesn’t make it better, it makes it a distraction.

9) You strip out as much CSS to be “cool”

Sorry, but making your site look 12 years out of date isn’t cool, and does nothing for usability. Courier isn’t a sexy font, it has a place… the font graveyard. No, but really – web application development is all about making your app as usable as possible, and friendly to the eye to boot. Stripping out CSS and making your layout and text look nasty isn’t winning any awards.

10) The last time you updated the site was 3 months ago

There is a reason why “release early, release often” is bandied around more often than Britney photos of her getting out of a car… People love seeing progress on a site, love having their ideas and feature requests realized, and love feeling part of the whole experience. A stale web app is your biggest enemy, and you’ll seen see your users leave in droves.

11) You used an under construction sign

Why people use these I really don’t know. There is nothing more unappealing than having a black and yellow construction sign on the front page of your web app – or worse, as part of the header or footer of your site! Use a nice beta sign if it’s a little work in progress, and if your site isn’t ready to launch, don’t put anything on the domain page… just walk away – there’s nothing to see here.

Tools to help you learn…

Learning jQuery 1.3	Amazon Kindle 2	jQuery UI 1.6

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 and is filed under AWS, Development, Technology, WordPress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.