Bad Website Practices

1. Execrable Content:
   This is the worst offence. Mission Statements, technical gobbledygook, buzzwords. Courses in good grammar, plain English and general communication skills are what is needed in bucketfuls.
2. Poor Navigation:
   In the stampede to squeeze more and more into each page, navigation cues become ambiguous and redundant. A visitor to a page he has seen three times is not a happy camper.
3. Search and Ye Shall Find:
   Not likely. Many websites do not have a single item of code that would help a search engine find it.
4. Flash Animation:
   Huge Flash animations may impress clients but serve to frustrate (splash pages) and irritate (internal pages) visitors. They are search engine UNfriendly. Why put an expensive Flash animation as the home page and then add 'Skip Flash'?
5. GIF Animations:
   The days of the rotating email and flapping flag are surely numbered?
6. Massive graphics:
   Almost a full page in many instances. Again, impressive to clients but even in these days of high bandwidths, some of your visitors will still, by choice, be on dialup.
7. Poor Graphics Palette:
   Bright colours are fine but may make it difficult to focus the eye on your items of real interest.
8. Printing Woes:
   Configure a stylesheet to just print the content - many sites print out the whole page with half the content.
9. Liquid Pages:
   Basically left and right elements of fixed width with a middle - the content - that fills the gap. Fine and readable on 1024 x 768 screens but not on 1248 x 1024 screens or above when paragraphs become single lines of text and almost illegible.
10. Frames:
    Have their uses but should be avoided if at all possible. Search engines hate them.