USABILITY

1) Make contact difficult. See funny examples here: What is more important than contact? Your clients should be able to contact you easily from anywhere in your site.

2) Incorrect META TAGS - these HTML tags are used by search engines to find, classify and post data about your site. If you don't have them you aren't coming up in your clients searches as well as you would if you did have them.

3) Inconsistent navigation. See inconsistent example here:

4) Mystery Meat navigation: http://www.fixingyourwebsite.com/mysterymeat.html (external)

5) Type over image. See examples here:

6) "Enter" or "Welcome" page. Why add extra load time and an extra task? Duh!

7) Flash. See # 4. Read this: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html

8) Tiny or faded type. Do you want that 70 year old billionaire investor to read your type? Duh!

9) Incorrect spacing around text or wrong font. See example here:

10) Incorrect justification of type. See example here:

11) Shipping. Keep the shipping prices a secret and loose 60% of your customers.

GRAPHICS and LAYOUT

1) White Space - Too little makes design feels cramped and makes finding information difficult. (See #8 Incorrect spacing above.) Too little spacing makes the design feel empty.

2) Too much text, not enough headings. Most people scan headlines looking for information.

3) The wrong images. For instance a Biotech company might want to emphasis it's humaneness if it is selling to the public. It might need to emphasis it's technology if it is selling to businesses or setting itself up to be bought out.

4) Poor logo design. Does it work on print as well as the web? Does it work when shrunk to business card size? Does it convey who you are? Is it simple and direct and extendable?

5) Garish colors unnecessary blinking. See example here:

6) Incorrectly imbedded images or incorrect logo design. See example here:

7) Incorrect image types or compression. See examples here:

Check your site here: (external site) this site only checks sizes of images not image types.

TECHNICAL

1) Search Engine Optimization - I can't tell you how many sites I see that don't even have the basic code needed to get listed in search engines. It takes about 20 minutes to add meta tags. There are other more important things to be done but meta tags only take a few minutes.

2) Unnecessary Technology - Will make your site slow or crash your client's computer. This happens when coders design sites instead of designers. They may assume everyone uses a powerful workstation. Applets, PDF files, and Flash are all examples of frequently misused technology. Imagine the reaction your clients or investors will have, if every time they visit your site their machines lock up and they have to force quit their browser or worse, reboot. You should always WARN THE USER before you sentence them to use technology they might not like.

3) HTML code that does not conform to standards.

Check your site here: (external) to see if it conforms.

4) Cross platform browser issues. Will your designer check your site on several different browsers on several different platforms?

5) Dead links.

Check your site here: (external) for cross browser issues and dead links.