Making a poorly designed website is one of the easiest things you can do as a webmaster! You barely need to try! If you want to run a successful high traffic website there are many different elements of design that you need to implement, and ones you need to avoid.

This article will describe some of the major design flaws in many new websites. Design flaws that will reduce your traffic flow, reduce your amount of loyal viewers, and generally annoy people. It is my hopes that be identifying these negative web design attributes that people will be able to reduce the usage of them, thus designing a better more profitable website for themselves.

Excessive use of Frames

In the early days of the web, frames were a normal thing to see. They were all over the place! However with more recently developments in web design frames are really unnecessary thing. There are some useful applications for them, however generally I discourage their use, especially multiple frames on a single website!

Bad Colour Scheme

If your website is too dark or bright you might be hurting your users eyes! Have you ever surfed to a website with a really bright background that just made your eyes hurt when you tried to read something? In addition to the layout colours, font colours and sizes are also very important. You must make sure that your font stands out from your background and is of adequate size!

Unsorted or Useless Websites

Many websites are made by people who didn't really think ahead of time about what they wanted to do. If you can't clearly identify what your website is about, how is your user supposed to? I'm not saying you can make some stupid websites for fun or as a joke, but if it's your business or hobby website, make sure your user knows that.

Infrequent Updates

Some websites are created and then abandoned. I myself have let many websites I had designed in the past die away without updates. If you want to constantly get traffic and keep users interested, it's important to add updates, new pages, comments or just check to make sure your links work still.

Slow Loading

If your website is chalk full of graphics, animations, and sounds there is a good chance that you are blocking many dial up users from your website. Remember that just because you are on a high speed connection, doesn't mean that all the people viewing your website are. If you have lots of multimedia content, try to provide a low bandwidth version of your site for people on slower connections. Another common problem is the web server which hosts your site, if its connection to the Internet is too slow, of if the computer to too over burdened it may be slowing down your website loading speed significantly.

Try to keep these tips in mind when you are designing your website, and selecting your hosting provider. Don't make the same mistakes as many people before you. By thinking out what you want to do ahead of time, and knowing common problems, you can design a better more attractive and high traffic website.