Following up on part one, in this post we discuss further website design and development pitfalls to avoid.

Make use of web-safe fonts
Not all fonts render the same on different computers. Web-safe fonts are those fonts that are commonly installed on all computers by computer manufacturers. The overall look and feel of a website influences your visitors’ first impressions, and the font you decide to use is an important part of establishing the “look” of a website. Ideally, the font used should be attractive and easy to read. To help you choose a font, use the Font Tester.

Make sure your website is compatible with all browsers
You want visitors to see the website as you’re seeing it. Since each website browser and operating system interprets code in a different way, it is important to ensure that your website renders properly in all browsers. Brower Shots is a handy tool that allows you to preview your website in various browsers.

Make use of a sitemaps
A sitemap classifies website information and graphically illustrates the structure of the website. Not only does a sitemap help human visitors to find information easily but an XML sitemap is a communication tool used to show search engines all the pages on your site.

An XML sitemap allows search engines easy access to all of your site’s content and also notifies them quickly when your site is updated. You should create one using the correct protocol and upload it to the root directory (yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). Once you’ve done this, submit the sitemap to Google to ensure that the search engine’s spiders visit your website and index those pages.

Meta tags
In September 2009 Google announced that their search engine no longer makes use of the keyword meta-tag to rank websites. Yet, this does not mean that meta-tags should be ignored since other search engines still use them.

Search engines use the content in your website’s meta-description tag on their results pages as the ‘snippet’ describing your page. It’s therefore important to optimise the meta-description by making the content enticing and descriptive of the page to ensure higher click-through rates.

Title tags are one of the most important elements on a page. They play an important role in SEO and for click-throughs from SERPs. The title tag is used on the search engine result pages as the clickable link, and these need to be descriptive and concisely describe the content of the webpage. Titles should contain the page’s most important keywords.

With hundreds of thousands of professionally designed websites on the Internet it is important to make sure that your site stands out for the right reasons - sometimes it’s shocking to see the poor quality of some websites (and some of these are designed by ‘professionals’ too!). Don’t despair, there are a couple of things that you can watch out for to ensure that your site doesn’t wind up as an example of what not to do.

One: Flash introduction pages
Flash introductions can look nice and attractive since they include animated and interactive elements but, aesthetics aside, many users find them frustrating. Users don’t like to wait for an intro page to load in order to reach the content so if you are going to include such a page on your website, make sure there is a ‘skip intro’ button as well as a loading bar to show visitors how long they will have to wait.

The loading time of such a page depends on what is included on it. For example music and images increase the loading time significantly. Remember, in the online sphere no-one has time to wait. If your website can’t provide them with the information they need, fast, they will click back and find it somewhere else. In terms of SEO a pure flash page is a big no-no because many search engines cannot read flash files easily. For this reason, if you decide to make use of a flash intro, make sure your underlying content is indexable and includes meta tags with title tags and relevant keywords.

Two: A ghastly colour palette
Probably the first thing a visitor to your site will notice is its colour palette. This is why the colours you chose for your site’s template play a vital role in the success of your website. Colours have a significant psychological impact on visitors and it is important to keep in mind the different meanings associated with different colours. For example, white is associated with innocence and purity whereas red is associated with passion and danger. Your colour choices should be based on factors like the market you are targeting, your brand’s positioning and the type of services or products you are promoting. Keep in mind that too many colours might be distracting. It’s a good idea to use colour to highlight important elements on your pages like headings and links. Be consistent!

Three: Bad layout and navigation
Your visitors need to know exactly where they are on your website at all times and what you want them to do, therefore it is important to include clear and consistent calls to action. The website’s layout should be logical and at first glance define what the website is about. Also, make use of links within your website’s text to lead visitors deeper into your website. Remember, if you offer high quality content visitors will want to come back to your website.

Yesterday, Google announced their acquisition of Admob on the Google blog.

Admob, a dominant player in the mobile advertising arena, was founded in 2006 after Omar Hamoui couldn’t find ways to generate traffic to his mobile site.  As a solution to this problem, the Admob platform was developed. Since then, Hamoui and his team have grown Admob into a thriving and innovative mobile advertising company.  With this merger Google is aggressively entering the mobile advertising market and as a result of this acquisition Google will dominate the mobile advertising arena with approximately 30% - 40% of the market share.

According to Google mobile revenue is their fastest growing revenue stream. This can, in part, be attributed to the introduction of smart phones with advanced Internet browsers.  Google states that their mobile search requests have increased more than five times over the past two years.

The partnership between Google and Admob will result in increased advertising in applications on smart phones such as the iPhone and others that run on Android.  Within applications these ads are typically displayed as a banner at the top or bottom of the screen.

Admob’s publisher network is made up of more than 15 000 mobile websites and applications and according to Admob they received 2.6-billion ad requests from iPhone and iPod Touch devices in September 2009, up from 130-million in September 2008.  Even though Google has been displaying text ads on mobile search results it hasn’t had much success with mobile web display ads or in-app ads – until now.