With that said webdesign is a complex
issue and I could discuss it for days with you but for this article and for the
moment anyway I'll concentrate on sharing the things you shouldn't do when it comes
to designing your site as ultimately bad webdesign affects people more than good
webdesign. These don'ts of webdesign are in point by point format.

Don't use frames. Frames are a thing of
the past and are out of fashion, they mostly confuse visitors and they basically
destroy your chances of getting good search engine traffic, not to mention the
problems associated with bookmarking and printing pages that use frames.

Don't limit access to your site by
requiring visitors to already have or download a certain plug-in, this is the same as
increasing download time and most people won't bother to wait for the download,
they'll just visit your competition instead.

Don't have scrolling pages which require
the visitor to scroll sideways to see the whole page. This is so annoying to most
visitors that they'll leave straight away. This happens when you design your site at
a certain resolution and someone visits with a resolution lower than that. Design for
a resolution of 640x480 if you want to be sure that your pages avoid having scroll
bars. You're pretty safe however designing and maximizing your pages for an 800x600
resolution because most people nowadays surf in that resolution.

Don't annoy your visitors with blinking
text, pages full of banners, continuous background music that slows down everything,
pop-up windows, text that's hard to read because it's a similar color to the
background etc. If you do annoy them you can bet they won't return.

Don't use under construction pages,
you're only wasting peoples time if you direct them to a page that's not ready so
never link to pages unless they're finished.

Don't make visitors wait, if people have
to wait for a page to download because it's bogged down with too much graphics and
other media they'll just leave.

Avoiding the above don'ts of webdesign
will at least give you a chance of retaining visitors and maybe even have a few of
them return.