Design for your audience

Audience must be able to understand what the site is about at a glance. Provide a focal point for the home page. Design for Audience expectations, and use established conventions.

Web Design is not a fashion parade.

Dont use tiny text because ‘it looks cool’. You may be able to read it, but anyone over 35 will have trouble. Avoid flash “splash” or “intro” pages. Your audience considers them to be a waste of time and kilobytes. Pages that are designed to “scroll horizontally” are a nightmare to use and just annoying. Pop-up windows have been so badly abused by amatures in the past they are now blocked by browsers. Avoid. Avoid having sound play in the background when a web page loads, unless the site is related to music. If you must have sound playing, provide an on / off / volume controller on the page. If your site has banner ads, keep them well away from your site graphics.

Web Design is not a cheap gimmick.

Blinking buttons and similar images. Pointless info like “Download latest browser” buttons, “PHP Enabled”, “Best Viewed in Firefox” or “Made with Mac”. “clip art” and badly drawn “characters” instead of high-quality web graphics. High contrast, highly saturated background patterns that make my eyeballs bleed. Trailing or otherwise animated mouse cursor. God save us from over enthusiastic geeks. “Under Construction” graphics are helpful because they inform your audience that you are too lazy or incompetent to get your site finished. 3-D graphics produced by non-professionals. There’s no reason for a globe image. We get that you’re “global”. Hit counters. Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but nobody actually cares. Scrolling, blinking, fading or moving text, they all spell “cheap and nasty”.

Make the site Accessable

Use white space to make text easier to read.
Don't use more than 3 font faces.
Use The color contrast analyzer to verify contrast between text/links and the background.
All IMG tags must have ALT= attribute text filled in.