Getting stuff right on your website is like being a good carpenter. “Measure twice, cut once” goes the dictum. But even the most experienced carpenter can get it wrong.

There are quite a few things that can go wrong in any design and as trends change and generational audiences change, the list grows!

Hiding information from your website visitors is something that can easily happen, as web template designers incorporate more attractive visual features. As a designer, you become captivated. But are your readers getting the information for which they came?

Here’s the start of a list that might help you go from getting stuff wrong to getting stuff right:

• Slider / carousel: can people actually capture the content you want them to capture?
• Text that appears on hover: do people sit long enough to see it?
• Tabs: check your stats. Is anyone clicking adjacent tabs on a tabbed page?

We used to have all of these on famvin.org or one of our client’s websites. We’ve ditched them all or modified them so they work the way we want them. (I tried to get Beth Nicol, famvin’s web designer, to use text-on-hover once. Suffice it to say she resisted!)

Click and read the rest of the list and check out some good visual representations by Gill Andrews, a content creator and web consultant. What have you discovered about successes and failures in web design?