Studies have shown that most people will wait an average of 15 seconds for a website to become clear before going somewhere else. This means you have 15 seconds to capture the attention of a new visitor to your website. If your website takes too long to load, is confusing, is crammed with too much information, is too busy, is too annoying, or is just plain ugly, the visitor will give up on your site and probably never return.

Besides general clutter, there is nothing worse than a website without adequate information. Not having enough information about who you are and what you offer, or having that information badly organized is almost as annoying as animated gifs.

People are often under the impression, that in the land of websites, there are no bad addresses. True, there aren’t any physical addresses at all. However, when it comes to websites, bad location is often built right into the code.

Telling someone who has just visited your website that they need to adapt their system or preferences by downloading complicated programs, changing browsers, listening to things they don’t want to listen to, or waiting for ads they don’t want to see in order to have the honor of viewing your website is rude.

A good navigation system should be like the arteries in a body. It should reach every cell as directly as possible. Your navigation should be consistent and redundant to achieve this. It should stick to it’s own rules and offer many ways of getting to all the pages.

Many of us live in an overwhelming, distracting and often ugly urban environment. Creating a little beauty lets people relax, slow down and take a breath when they visit. Taste is subjective, of course so it’s important to run your design by as many people as possible to get a wide variety of opinions.