50 Ways You Can Ruin Your Website

Photo By brentdanley

What can you do to a good website that could hurt search engine rankings, lose customers and overall ruin your reputation? This question needed answering, so we set out on popular web development forums such as Digital Point and SitePoint to find out from industry experts. Here is what they had to say:

1. Get your site built with a popular CMS like Joomla or Wordpress and then hand it over to someone who doesn’t understand server side programming and decides to convert everything to static HTML pages.
   
   
2. Get your site ranking very well in the search engines then make your site temporarily down for maintenance for three or more days.
   
   
3. Convert your SEO optimized web site into a flash site.
   
   
4. Allow your site to contain well outdated information.
   
   
5. Overload it with ads.
   
   
6. Use images of large size (downloading time too long).
   
   
7. Allow the functionality of site to not work (E.g - Login form doesn’t work, or db connections,etc.)
   
   
8. Have broken links.
   
   
9. Embed sound into the website, with no apparent way to shut it off.
   
   
10. Use Comic Sans as your default font on your professional site.
    
    
11. Using a WYSIWYG program like Dreamweaver or FrontPage without understanding what the program is doing, and therefore not being able to go in and fix bad code.
    
    
12. Delete everything inside the root folder.
    
    
13. Get unsanitized form input from the user.
    
    
14. Send your FTP info overseas for support.
    
    
15. Allow all comments to pass through un-filtered.
    
    
16. Leave comments un-moderated.
    
    
17. Use brightly-colored backgrounds like pure red and green.
    
    
18. Use animated gifs.
    
    
19. Use clipart.
    
    
20. Have pages with huge blocks of text with no paragraphs or headers.
    
    
21. Have under construction pages with no content.
    
    
22. Block access to IE users and force a redirect to Firefox (yes, some websites actually do this).
    
    
23. rite like u never had a education
    
    
24. Leave your CPanel open for everyone’s access.
    
    
25. Make your site resize browser windows.
    
    
26. Link to sites that are banned by search engines.
    
    
27. Edit your source code without backing it up first.
    
    
28. Forget to pay your bills, so your host will shut you down.
    
    
29. Use a mystery meat navigation system (What page does a red Square image take me too?)
    
    
30. Get an SEO consultant, and then ditch them and the links when you’ve got a high ranking, thinking the ranking will stay.
    
    
31. Web browsers can handle 256 million colors. You must use them all!
    
    
32. Copy other peoples content.
    
    
33. Get the cheapest person from China you can find to code your website.
    
    
34. Have a long pointless flash intro that cannot be skipped.
    
    
35. Have a different style/navigation/background for every page of the same site.
    
    
36. Have videos that auto-start on load
    
    
37. Display videos in a non-Flash format that require browser plugins.
    
    
38. Spam keywords on the top and bottom of the pages. Nothing says professional like a huge block of nonsensical links.
    
    
39. Have more ads than actual content.
    
    
40. Write a top ten list, but split in 10 separate long-to-load pages.
    
    
41. Put your site in frames.
    
    
42. Use really bright text on a white background.
    
    
43. Use Flash-based navigation
    
    
44. Use Flash-based content
    
    
45. Have tons of popups and pop-unders.
    
    
46. Use animated backgrounds, fluorescent colors or glittering headers.
    
    
47. Have text that moves, or something that changes the look of your mouse pointer
    
    
48. Use images from other websites and use up their bandwidth.
    
    
49. Use colored scrollbars.
    
    
50. Hand over your site to your cousin’s nephew’s neighbor’s thirteen year old with experience customizing his MySpace page.

And there you have it, 50 surefire ways you can ruin your website and damage your reputation online. Do you have more ways you can ruin a site? Please share by posting a comment below.