Top 10 bad practices that can in fact be very damaging to your web presence not just to the common user surfing your site, but for search engines too.
The List of 10
1. Never put a hit counter on the bottom of your website. Hit counters are an old practice and aren't around as much as they used to be. Normally you'd see them on the bottom of a website in some nasty red or yellow text. They create link spam, can by insecure in their code and well they are just ugly and cheap.
2. Never place live email addresses on your website. Unless you want to be added to every email spam list in cyber space then you should think about making a contact form "where the email is hidden" or make the email an image. You can actually make click-able mobile friendly images:)
3. Never tell Robots to go away from your entire site using robots.txt If you have a page or directory that you want to not index in google then use a tag to tell them to go away. If you tell googlebot to go away with robots.txt it could take a VERY LONG TIME for google to come back. Sometimes we have good reasons to do this but for the most part, you should think twice. Just use a nofollow,noindex in meta.
4. Never use more than 2-3 fonts on your website. Believe it or not typography is a very important aspect to your website and in keeping people interested. Websites that have too many fonts can actually confuse the person looking at your site. People are visual creatures. Don't confuse people by over-burdening their mind with confusing themes. A theme after all is supposed to be cohesive.
5. Never use more than 2-3 colors on your website. Believe it or not coloring is a very important aspect to your website and in keeping people interested. Websites that have too many colors can actually confuse the person looking at your site. People are visual creatures. Don't confuse people by over-burdening their mind with confusing themes. A theme after all is supposed to be cohesive.
6. Never offer a registration page, newsletter signup, personal account, or checkout page without proper SSL. You always want to offer security for those that are giving up personal information. Always avoid websites that do not have SSL installed on the proper pages. You can almost guarantee that most of the more popular websites out there such as Amazon, or Ebay are always using https:// and quite often.
7. Never place the virtual talking woman on your site. Yes you know her, the one that follows you around the page when you scroll and doesn't go away until you turn her off. Even worse, the one that doesn't turn off at all! If you want a sure way to decrease traffic to your website, add this little widget to your site.
8. Always host with a trusted host, such as http://www.groupaaa.com;. Do your homework before you pay a hosting company to take care of your lively hood. There are hundreds and hundreds of them out there and some are not worth your time.
9. Never place screen popups on your website just for ad reasons. There is nothing more annoying than when I go to a website and I can't read the content because there are 2-3 windows that popped up. Sometimes even when you close THOSE windows you get more than open. It's tacky, slows things down, and is bad practice.
10. Never keep the install directory in your OpenCart server after you install it. This is very unsafe. It basically just opens up your entire world to invaders.