What was your biggest newbie mistake?

[Soliloquy]

Everyone makes mistakes when they're new to web design. In my case it was linking several pictures to the copies on my hard drive, not the server; the page in question had been up for about a week when a complete stranger finally emailed me to let me know. Pretty embarrassing!

 

[niconico]

Everyone makes mistakes when they're new to web design. In my case it was linking several pictures to the copies on my hard drive, not the server; the page in question had been up for about a week when a complete stranger finally emailed me to let me know. Pretty embarrassing!

Semi-related to this, one of my biggest rookie mistakes was letting the HTML handle image resizing. I would upload these huge images and then change the dimensions of the image in my code. This is terrible for load times, and is always a sign of a newbie. Someone pointed it out to me, I downloaded a copy of the GIMP and have never looked back. The lesson is: always resize your images to web size BEFORE uploading to the server!

 

[behappie]

I see this quite a lot. Many website designers just include text into an image.
Why is it so bad?
For starters, search engines can’t “see” the image like people can. Therefore, search engines can’t “read” the text on the image. Essentially, it’s the equivalent to not including the text at all.
In the example below, the entire banner above the fold is one image. Because of that, the website is missing an H1 tag, a subheadline, and main benefits that could be helpful in ranking higher for their target keywords.

 

[TeeGee]

Starting without taking time to really research and learn about what I was getting into before I could realize my mistake I already spent blindly but now I am glad I started though.

 

[Zuby]

Going for a premium domain was the biggest mistake that I have made as a newbie. Yes, having a premium domain is good but it's something that's needs to be done when you know exactly what you're doing.