Designing websites is a never-ending learning experience. What seemed so very impressive to me when I began creating sites in 1998 (“Ooh! I can make tables!”) leaves me a little more cold these days. Sometimes it can be easy to get so caught up in what you’re doing, that you don’t look at it from the surfer’s perspective and think: “Do I really need this on my website?” Here are some of my most frequent gripes while browsing pages:

Needless "Enter" Pages -- I encounter this one a fair bit: you load a page, and all it contains is a (generally large) image link with text telling you to “click to enter!” But these pages are really just superfluous, and make more loading time for the user; and on top of that, I never even wait for the enter graphic to load. Which leads me to my next item -

Image Links -- So many sites that I visit utilize image links as their menus, which are generally quite slow-loading. When I visit a site, I have no interest in waiting 3 minutes to look at the graphics; I simply want to find the information I’m after. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to everything, but in the most cases I find text links to be a lot more convenient.

10,000 items remaining -- Having lots of content is great. But having it all on one mile-long page isn’t. Until high-speed Internet becomes the standard, pages with too much information to load will only serve to frustrate your visitors – and breaking things up into manageable sections also makes sense aesthetically.

Right-click Disabled -- This javascript, which disables right-clicking on any page running it, seems to be all the rage at the moment. However, it’s really quite pointless. The idea behind it is to stop visitors taking content without permission – but the javascript does nothing to stop them, it only makes it slightly less convenient. But it does serve to irritate users like myself, who have no desire to take content; all I want to do is open links in a new window, since not everyone uses the ‘target=”_top”’ command. This is especially irritating on frames sites that employ the javascript but not the ‘target=”top”’, causing all external links to load inside their frames.

Pointless Flash Introductions -- I think Flash is a great medium, with many useful applications. What isn’t so useful is when people create introductory pages with a movie that does nothing but change colors and then invite them to “click to enter” –after waiting 5 minutes for it to load. If the movie related to the site in a useful or interesting way, it would be more understandable, but why make your visitors wait just to watch your company logo spelled out in flashing 3-D letters? This is especially agitating when there is no “skip intro” link provided.

These are just a few common things that can easily be overlooked, and put off visitors to you site. But don’t feel bad if your site falls under one of these categories. After all, this article is coming from someone who once had blinking text on her site, so we’ve all been there.