The purpose of this article is to explain the basic design mistakes common to most poker websites and to provide tips to help you avoid having a badly designed website. Consider it a tutorial on poker website design.

(I'm available for poker website design consulting. Click on the link to the "Poker SEO Consulting" page in the right navbar for more information about my background and fees.)

What Does a Well Designed Poker Website Do?

John T. Reed points out in his book How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Own How-To Book that writing well is like building a clear pane of glass window between your thoughts and the reader. Most poor writers try to design a stained glass window instead. They're so busy trying to demonstrate their cleverness that they sacrifice clarity and quality.

What does this have to do with website design? Content is the most important part of design, and all of your design decisions should be based on making your content more accessible to readers. If your content sucks, then it doesn't matter how pretty your website is. Pretty websites often have the worst content on the Internet.

Making your content accessible to readers is the purpose of good website design.

What Design Aspects Make Content Accessible?

There are 2 aspects of accessibility concerning content, but what's good for the 1st aspect is almost always good for the 2nd aspect too. The 1st aspect is making sure that users who are on your website can easily find and read your content. The 2nd aspect is to help users who are NOT on your website find and read your content. (This 2nd aspect is called SEO.)

Poker Website Design Mistakes

The following is a list of the most common poker website design mistakes. Design mistakes include anything that makes it harder for a user to find, read and understand your content.

Excessive Graphics and Advertising

Graphics are fine when they add to the look of a page, but every graphic that's added to a web page increases the amount of time it takes the page to load. If it takes more than 10 seconds for you page to load, you can forget about a user sticking around to read your content. Most poker websites use too many images, and the images they use are too large.

Most poker websites that use too many large images are using them for advertisements. Text link advertising is at least as effective as image based advertising, and it doesn't slow down the load times of your pages.

Animated graphics are bigger than graphics that don't move, and they usually subtract from the user experience instead of adding to it.

Using an image for a background looks cheap. You'll notice that Google and Yahoo don't use image backgrounds.

Popup windows make for a horrible user experience. They distract from your content and anger users.

Poorly Laid Out and Poorly Written Content

Effective web pages present content in a way that keeps a reader's attention. Most web users scan pages instead of reading them, so having clearly defined headers and subsections makes the site easier to scan. That's good design.

Shorter sentences and paragraphs also make content easier to scan. Bulleted lists and using numerals (instead of writing out numbers) makes content more accessible too. Making key points stand out by putting them in bold type also makes your content easier to understand.

Content that is poorly written, doesn't make sense, or just rehashes content that's available elsewhere demonstrates contempt for your reader. That's bad design, and it drives readers away, usually never to return.

Also, if you're using a font size smaller than 11px or 12px, then your pages are hard to read for some people. Users navigate away from pages that are hard to read.

Exclamation points run rampant in online poker writing. Avoid them.

Form Over Substance

Many poker website owners who don't do their own design work hire a web designer to build them a pretty website. They spend money on what is often inferior design from the designer without even knowing it's inferior.

These poker webmasters suffer from prioritizing form over substance. They're more concerned with the site "looking" professional than they are with providing quality content.

Guess what? Poor quality content always looks unprofessional, no matter how spiffy the pages are.

These sites are usually graphic heavy, slow to load, and bloated with unnecessary code. The URL's are almost invariably search engine unfriendly. Often they use flash or javascript for critical design elements that would be better implemented using text or a flat image.

Bells and whistles don't matter. Good clearly-presented content matters.

Disorganized Content

Think folders and subfolders when you're setting up your website's information architecture. Some people put everything in the root directory and have really complicated URL's, like example.com/example-keywords-more-keywords.html.

They'd be a lot better off using a URL that not only makes sense logically, but also one that someone might remember. (For example, "poker games" is a subcategory of "poker". So an appropriate URL for that would be example.com/poker/games/.

Then when you set up the site navigation, use descriptive text links so that people can find the content that they're interested in easily. "Click here" is a lousy way to describe the content of a page about "Texas holdem". And using "click here" as anchor text sends signal to the search engine that your page is about the subject of "click here".

Users being unable to find your content because you're not using good anchor text in your navigation is a major web design mistake.

Using Nonstandard Web Conventions

People are used to links that are underlined and blue or purple. When you deviate from that convention on your web page, you make the user have to think harder about what she has to do to navigate your site.

That's bad web design.

Another mistake is underlining words for emphasis. This frustrates users who think that since the words are underlined they must be links. Use bold or italics to emphasize words instead.

Good Poker Website Design = Good Usability = Good SEO

For some reason people in the online poker industry think that good SEO interferes with a website's usability. Most of what they think looks great really looks bad, and most of what they think is more usable just makes their site less user friendly. Serious users want serious content, and they want it in an easily found and easily read manner.

That's good website design, good usability, and good search engine optimizaton, all rolled into one. And it's not complicated.

Amateur web designers can make a user and search engine friendly website after spending a few hours learning some basic HTML and maybe learning to use a WYSWIG program. Unfortunately many of them don't take the time and hire web designers instead.

And since they don't have a background in any of the nuts and bolts behind a website, they don't have any frame of reference for deciding whether or not their webmaster did a good job.

Don't make that mistake. If you're going to hire a web designer, take the time to learn to use Frontpage or Dreamweaver and basic HTML. Then you can make an educated evaluation of how good a job a web designer is going to do for you.