Your site is not accessible to visually-impaired users. Artists may not feel that accommodating blind or low-vision visitors to their websites is necessary — after all, they may think, is a blind person likely to be searching art sites?

However, even sighted visitors may have image loading turned off to save download time, and recent court cases have suggested that companies with online shopping capabilities must provide equal accessibility to the visually impaired under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Be sure your site isn't invisible to the blind and low-vision visitor.

Your site content is outdated or incorrect.   Recently I read an article in a national artists' magazine on how to get better search rankings for your website. Four of the methods the author recommended are not currently valid for optimizing search engine rankings, yet the article had just been published as new and necessary information for artists.

To make it worse, the author was presenting himself as an experienced web designer specializing in sites for visual artists. When I visited his site to check out his work, I immediately saw that his own site had not been updated since 1999.

Eight years is a lifetime on the Internet. Readers might be justified in wondering just how up-to-date on current technology and browser specifics his clients' websites are.

There are at least three easy ways for a determined person to save an online image without using right-click. Disabling it prevents your visitors from fully using their browsers and accuses them of being thieves.

You disable right-click to protect your photographs.   This is more commonly a mistake made by visual artists who fear a casual visitor stealing an image from their site. Unfortunately, disabling right-click is like locking a screen door — it doesn't deter the thieves and it only irritates your legitimate customers. Don't make it difficult for a visitor to bookmark your site.

You startle visitors with popup boxes. Popup windows have their place, to show details of an item in a larger window or to provide additional details without cluttering up the main page. However, popups should always be controlled by the visitor. Tell them that a link will open a popup window when they click on it. Make it easy for them to look and then close the popup box. And whatever you do, don't use popups that load automatically in front of everything when a page is opened. Nothing you are selling is important enough to annoy customers into closing your site and never coming back.

Your site is riddled with poor grammar and spelling errors. No one's perfect, not even professional website designers. Be sure someone reviews your site with an eye to grammar and spelling, especially if you've created your site yourself, before your visitors decide that all your business practices are as careless as your proofreader's.

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© 2007 Carol Logan Newbill for Pisces Moon Web Design; all rights reserved.