1. No page counters: Page counters do nothing except make you look like an amateur, mess with your design and tell people information about your site you probably don’t want them to know!

If you want to know how many people are hitting your site, just ask your host for server stats. Any host worth it’s salt should be able to provide you with detailed stats that make page counters look stupid.

2. Forget blinking or flashing text: The only place you see blinking and or flashing text is on the neon signs of naked bars or web sites made in the mid 90s! People don’t like them and expect to see naked people inside sites or buildings that have them … enough said.

3. Make your titles on your web page make sense: One of the core attributes of a web page is its title. In between the <title> </title> tags you can specify the page's title as it appears in the browsers top title bar and in the search engine results.

People pay attention to page titles, so you should make sure that they are clear. If you have a page on how to take care of dogs and you happen to have a dog named ‘Jimmy’ don’t title your page: ‘How to look after Jimmy and his furry friends.’ You should title you page something like: ‘How to take care of dogs.’

4. Don’t force people to download a new browser or special plug-in to see your site: Unless you have a site that people are dying to see, why limit your audience because you want to use some special features in a browser or a plug-in like Flash. Today, with proper use of CSS and HTML you can present fantastic looking pages without having to jump through the hoops old timers like me had to when garbage browsers like Netscape 4 were being used in great numbers.

7. Chat rooms: Most people don’t give a crap about chat rooms. And worse than having a chat room is an empty chat room! Who wants to hang out at a club that has nobody inside? So unless you have a web site with tens of thousands of visitors a month and is of a subject that might necessitate a chat room, don't do it.

8. Flash intros: I am guilty of this as much as the next guy. A few years back Flash intros where all the rage, not sure if anyone knew why we ‘needed’ them, but as it turns out the ‘skip intro’ button is the 2nd most clicked on the web today. Don’t waste your time on Flash intros and in my opinion Flash should be only used in special situations.

9. Under construction pages: Just forget it, if the page is not ready, don’t put it up. If you have links that are pointing to the pages, disable them until your page is ready. If your page is truly ‘under construction’ and has content on it that is ready to be seen by your web surfers, just post a ‘last updated’ date and make sure you get the new content in place soon. What ever you do, don’t put one of those cheesy ‘under construction’ images on the page.

10.  Don't use background music on your web pages!

Some web designers like the idea of a little background music to set the mood of the page. In special cases like say an MTV or Disney website, this can work. But for most websites this is just a bad idea for a two reasons:

1. Music files are typically pretty ‘heavy', and take time to download. Most surfers will not think that it's worth the wait. Besides, many computers simply don't have sound capability, so it seems silly to force these people to download something they can't use.
2. Unexpected music/sound spewing forth from ones PC can be very annoying and potentially cause problems.

If you want to have music on your web site, make it an option that the user can turn on and off. A good way to do this is with a Flash movie; most browsers come equipped with the Flash plug-in and the Flash supports compact MP3 files.

Of course, if you just want to give users the option to hear some piece of music, like your bands latest tune, or a sound clip from an interview, the easiest solution is to create an MP3 of the audio, and then create a link to it.

11.  Don't create automatic pop-up windows!

JavaScript pop-up windows are probably one of the most annoying things you can do to someone visiting your website. If you want to annoy your visitors go right ahead.

Pop-ups are typically used to present ads and other ‘non-core' material to users. If you use pop-up windows, you have to learn how to integrate those elements into your main pages and forget about pop-up windows.

12. Don't use busy backgrounds on your pages:

You can create a tiled background on your web page by taking an image (GIF, JPEG or PNG) and using it in your body tag like this:

<body background="myBackground.gif">

This will cause your browser to tile the image across the web page. There are two things wrong with this:

1. You want to do all your styling in CSS.
2. Background tiles are usually bad news.

Once upon a time tiled backgrounds where all the rage on the Internet; these days most have understood that it's just a bad idea. It can work if your tile image is not noisy and is a solid color, but if you use tiles that are of say a picture of your dog or some other bold image, it will make your page unreadable.