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There are millions of websites on the web today and many of them are only hurting themselves. There are numerous “no –no’s” being committed on the web today and as a web designer, you want to be sure that you are not committing these on your own website.

1. Don’t Be Plain: Do your best not to have solid background colors on your website, unless it is white or black. If you want to use another color, use a gradient from white to another color or from a darker shade to a lighter shade. Even with a subtle change, the effect will be noticed on your site and will provide it with a dimensional look.

2. No 2D Allowed: Do your best to not have 2D objects on your page, other than your text. If you use images of text you won’t get picked up on the search engines for your great content. Be careful to have some sort of text on the site so that you will get ranked by the search engines, but at the same time you want to include graphics that have beveled lettering and pictures as well.

3. Don’t Get Stroke Happy: Some colors just don’t go well together and outlining everything doesn’t help either. If your site is black or white or vice versa, then your contrast will be fine. Blue and white look good together as well. Green and red is a horrible color combination and you really can’t read red letters on green, nor can you read green letters on red. You can stroke the red letters in white and make them stand out, but it can be hard on the eyes to look at. If you stroke white letters with a black outline, it makes the letters appear blurry when they are on a colored background.

4. Optimize Your Images: You should always optimize your images. If you are working in Photoshop, keep your Quality on 60. This will help produce images with no visible quality loss, but as a jpeg they will be about 50% smaller. GIFs tend to be too big and take a long time to download.

5. Don’t Get Flash Happy: If you want something that moves on your page to liven it up, that’s okay. However, remember that it’s just an accent. Flash often takes a long time to download so if you’re using a splash page, be sure to give your reader an “out.” Most people are looking for information on the web and they aren’t willing to wait on your flash to load. Besides, the more text you have on your site, the more food you are providing the search engines. This will ensure that your site gets ranked instead of looked over because it is one big graphic.

About the author: Valerie Mellema is a freelance writer who lives in Amarillo, Texas.