Just remember value. If you provide that on your website, your visitors will keep coming back time and time again for more.

Use A Free Hosting Company

If you use a free hosting company, you may often get a huge ad on top of your website, before your content actually starts. This can put people off, and can look ugly. Also you wont have a unique url, it will be something like yoursite.freewebspace.com. I’m not saying that sites like freewebs and tripod are crap, it’s a great place to start of, just you cant really look professional hosted on a free service like that. Instead, I would strongly recommend to use a reliable shared hosting company like Host Gator.

Have No Content Above The Fold

Some websites have huge headers, and if visitors want to find content, they have to scroll really far down the page to find any content.

Have A Splash Page

Having a page before your actual website, that says click here to enter, with loads of heavy images can take a long time to load for people with a slow Internet connection, and can look very bad (unless you are a pro designer). You are actually making it harder for people to access your website. Some splash pages can look awesome, like this one below, but it can still be an annoyance to your website visitors. I would generally avoid them.

Create Your Website Just With Flash

Flash websites can sometimes be awesome, but most of them with heavy content can take a long time to load, even on a broadband connection. Plus search engines wont be able to index each individual page on your site, because it’s all flash. S.E.O will suck, and you will have to do some heavy manual promotion.

Not Check Your Website For Cross Browser Compatibility

If you want your website to be accessible by everyone, then it needs to be viewable by most if not all browsers, or at least latest browsers.

Have Music Playing On Your Website

Websites that automatically play music when loaded are very annoying. Sometimes people can’t find the pause of stop button, and it can be very annoying and off putting.

Opt In For A Second Best Domain

I have nothing wrong with .net or .biz, but why opt for second best domain? When you know you really want that .com!

Link To Non Existing Pages

People always link to stuff that doesn’t always exist. This can be very annoying for the end user, especially if they have been searching for a long time for something, and then your linking to something that’s not actually there.

Lock Copy And Pasting

Websites which have a lock on, that prevents people from right clicking can be very annoying. I know they are just trying to stop people nabbing their content, but even still *cough* print screen *cough*.

Build Your Website Out Of Tables

Building your website out of tables is a very bad move these days. XHTML and CSS is what you should be using. I have nothing against tables, and you should still use them within your site if needs be, just don’t have your whole site based around tables.

Have Annoying Pop-Ups

Websites that have pop-ups every time you visit them can be very off putting, and most of all very annoying. Don’t do it, even if you are getting paid a measly 1 cent per pop-up. It will put your visitors off!

Slow Loading Pages

Pages that contain hundreds of intense images can often crash people’s browsers, or just slow down their computer, and painfully take a long time to load.

Having A Counter On Your Website

Displaying a free counter on your website, can look very bad. You shouldn’t be showing off how many hits you get, that’s what sites like Alexa and compete are for. Things you should be showing off are your RSS Subscriber count and your Twitter Followers.

Stupid Repeating Background Images

Websites that use the same small background image that repeats itself both horizontally and vertically are generally crap. For example, a Pokemon image repeating itself all over your screen. Very annoying!

Use A Bad Color Palette

It can be very bad to use a color palette on your website, where all the colors clash. A great place to find color palettes is ColorLovers or ColorSchemer.

Use Stupid Text Effects

Using text effects that you get off these free online text generators can make your website look very tacky, not ‘cool’ as they make out it will look. My advice, use photoshop for your text effects.

Being Inconsistent

Using all different types of fonts across your website is inconsistent. If you use one font for your paragraphs and one font for your headers, then you should be safe. The same goes for text size, colors, etc.

Having To Scroll Horizontally Across Websites

Don’t you hate it when websites are too large for your screen? I’m not taking about the odd few pixels, like double if not triple your screen width. Websites should generally be no more than 1000px wide, 900 to be safe.

Using Rubbish Alternative Software

Say for instance you were building a big forum website, and you wanted it to achieve and have a thriving community of active members. But you couldn’t afford vBulletin or Invision Power Board, so you settled for phpBB (second best). It’s free for a reason. (phpBB is a very good forum software for beginners, but it just cant compete with the big boys).

Also some comments say I’m implying that WordPress is crap, but WordPress isn’t second best, it’s the best.

Animated Gif’s And General Rubbish

Basic website clutter can just make a website crap. Unnecessary junk that fills web pages, just to have content is very bad. A great example of this is the worst website in the world. Click on the image below to be amazed!

Step 1. Background

Start by creating a new document, I’ll be using a size of 540 x 540 pixels. Now fill the background with #a48034.

Now go and apply Filter > Noise > Add Noise, use similar settings to these:

Duplicate the Background layer then apply Filter > Artistic > Underpainting, you can use the default settings.

Lower the opacity for this layer to 25% and change the layer mode to Overlay.

Step 2. Base

First of all, get the Rectangular Marquee Tool then make a set-sized selection of 366 x 220 pixels in the middle of the document.

After making the selection, make a new layer then fill the selection with a dark brown color, I used #56220c.

Right-click the layer you just created and go into the Blending Options, apply the following settings:

• Inner Shadow
• Outer Glow
• Gradient Overlay
• Pattern OverlayTo use this pattern, first download it from here, open it in Photoshop then define it as a pattern (Edit > Define Pattern)
• Stroke

Be sure you paid attention to all the settings, and you should have gotten a result like this:

Step 3. Making the chalk board

Create another new layer then with the Rectangular Marquee Tool make a selection of about 360 x 190 pixels inside of the other layer.

Fill this selection with a dark grey, I used #232323. After filling your selection, apply the following layer styles:

• Drop Shadow
• Inner Glow
• Gradient Overlay

You should now have a chalk board like this:

Create a new layer then do a little bit of soft brushing on the inside of the chalk board. You can either leave the brushing, or erase away a bit with a grunge brush like I did.

After finishing off, change the layer mode to Soft Light and lower the opacity if you think it needs it.

Lastly you should add in your text. You can download the font that I used from here.

After writing out my text in white I lowered the fill to 70% and apply the following layer styles:

• Drop Shadow
• Inner Shadow

Step 4. Logo

Get the Horizontal Type Tool out and write your text in white.

The font I used above is called Helvetica Neue, but you’ll have to make use of what you have, be creative.

After writing your text, apply the following layer styles:

• Drop Shadow
• Inner Shadow

Lastly for the logo I added in a ‘fresh’ stamp, I’ve written a similar tutorial on this effect before, you can view it here.

Step 5. Navigation text

Lastly for this tutorial you’ll want to add in some navigation text, I added mine at the bottom of the blackboard in the brown area. First get the text tool and write out your links, then change the font and such.

In the above image I used the font Tahoma, size: 11 pt, color #ffffff.

Lower the fill for your text layer to 70% then apply the following layer styles:

• Drop Shadow
• Gradient Overlay

That’s pretty much it for this tutorial, you can download the PSD file from here if you need any help.