Worst practices for your website
Since the earliest websites were built, new an techniques, ideas and methods have been created, added, tried, tested and used to make sites more appealing and interactive. Many of these methods have been abandoned, or at least determined not to be beneficial, for good reason, and it is recommended that their usage be avoided in todays web environment. Although not a complete list, here we suggest many items that you need to avoid.
Remember the days of blinking text, animated email boxes, and little images following your mouse as it went across the page? Those days are long gone, and while cure for a moment they quickly lose their appeal. Always use professional ideas to create a professional website, and avoid being "cute" and "clever".
No matter what your websites message is, it won't be effective if you have pages full of typos. In fact, it's a pretty good way to show how uncaring you are about what you present to the world. Use a spell checker, have someone else read your copy, do whatever it takes to clean it up and sound professional.
It can be hard enough to get visitors to your site, so don't create a situation where, once they get to it, they have to wait endlessly for your pages to load into their browser. People often have little patience on the internet, wanting things now, not when your site decides to do its thing.
Visitors will have a variety of reasons to contant you from your website. If the only way people have to contact you is through an old-fashioned "mailto" link, expect more SPAM than legitimate email. It is much easier for your user to be able to use a page with a nice contact form, rather than needing to load up their email client and jump through hoops just to get a message off to you. Plus, your form can have fields to garnish additional information from your users.
Some sites are so intent on cramming as much information into their pages as possible that it becomes impossible for a visitor to determine what to do or where to go. Information overload is not a good thing. Keep a fair amount of white space, focus on your core message, and lead your visitors through your site.
Many designers want to be "revolutionary", "different" and "creative", but often times this leads to visitors having no clue what the purpose of the site is, what it does, how to navigate it, or what they should do on it. Different is good, but there is no point to it if it just doesn't work for your visitors.