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Okay, so no one wants to make a rubbish website. Sometimes, though, lessons are best learnt on what not to do rather than on what to do – so please take it in the tongue-in-cheek manner it was intended. The funniest thing about this is, I’m guilty of some of them myself.

Here it is from start to finish, How to Make a Rubbish Website in ten easy steps.

Choose a free hoster

Your route to a bad website begins with the hoster. Free hosters are a good way to start as they will offer you limited features and flood your site with adverts that are out of context (more on this in point 5). Furthermore, your site will be slow to load and will run out of bandwidth very quickly. Don’t worry about the fact you don’t have your own domain name – that helps highlight the lack of credibility your site has.

Write one draft of your site content and one draft only

Bad spelling and grammar give off an unprofessional image so once you’ve done a first draft of the site content launch it as it is. This saves you having to rewrite your content so that the most important information is at the top.

Use a WYSIWYG editor to code your site rather than learning to hard code

Now get down to the coding. Don’t fancy learning how to code HTML, CSS and JavaScript properly? No? Good, you don’t need to. Simply get hold of a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver and let that write / right the code for you. This helps the rubbishness of your site. You’ll end up with loads of inline CSS and JavaScript that you don’t understand. Your code will contain lots of extraneous information and won’t validate properly.

Make the layout as inconsistant as possible

Schneiderman’s Golden Rules of Usability state that you should strive for consistancy. What does Schneiderman know about rubbish websites? Nothing. Make sure the fonts, menus and colours scheme vary from page to page.

Make sure your site name comes first in every title tag on the site

Okay, so the site is designed, the content is there. So far, so rubbish. All rubbish websites have title tags that start with the site name; this makes it difficult for search engines to attribute keywords to your web pages and also frustrates any users that are trying to bookmark your pages.

Make your ads as instrusive as possible, ideally make sure they’re out of context

Now it’s time to start thinking about how to make money from your rubbish site. Sign up for as many advertising programmes as you can. You will want to use popups and popunders as these are the most rubbish. Avoid contextual advertising schemes as these can be unobstrusive if used properly.

Make entire sections of your website in Flash

Now’s time to develop some Flash-only content. These sections may look pretty but they are, in fact, rubbish. Make your users sit around and wait through lots of convoluted transitions only to find the information they wanted wasn’t there in the first place.

Test your website on one browser only

As long as your website renders correctly in the browser you usually use then that’s fine. There are loads of browsers out there but forget about them. Cross-browser incompatability is essential for any rubbish website.

Add a splash screen

Okay, your site is nearly done. Add one final layer of rubbishness: a splash screen. This will turn away visitors and help you get a lower search engine ranking.

Launch your site (it doesn’t matter if it’s finished – include as many “Under Construction” pages as you like)

That moment has come – you’re going to make your site live! Is the content finished? Don’t worry if it isn’t. All rubbish websites have an “Under Construction” page or ten in them.

For help making a website that isn’t rubbish, call me on 07843 483 078 or get a free quote now!

Tim Bennett is a freelance web designer from Leeds. He has a First Class Honours degree in Computing from Leeds Metropolitan University and currently runs his own one-man web design company, Texelate.