Don't slow your site down by using the latest and greatest cool stuff like animation and music. It takes longer to load the page than a nice clean site would. A lot of people exit a site that takes long to download. The majority of people browsing the web have a 5 second limit to their patience in having a web site load and then they move on.

If your text is too fancy and hard to read, then chances are that it won’t get read.

Don’t have a background that is too “busy”. Text is much easier to read on a solid background.

Designs that are “too much”. Too many colours, colours that clash and messy layouts are just not pleasing to the eye.

Don’t use light coloured text on a light coloured background and visa versa. Extreme contrasts in text and backgrounds are best.

Pages that are too long can be a problem. People don’t want to scroll through pages of information to find what they want. Rather list topics to enable the reader to isolate the specific subject they are looking for.

It is also important that the user can access all pages from your site from any other page. If the user has entered your site from a search engine, it might take them to a specific page that is not your home page and they would then have hit a dead-end and not be able to access the rest of your site.

While you are surfing the web, it is a good idea to keep a list of things that annoy you on other sites and then make sure that your site does not do the same.