We all want a site that Internet users ooh and aah over, but you need to be careful when deciding how many and which types of media to use. Not everybody is on a broadband connection. Even those who are don't want to take a break to make dinner while waiting for your page to load. NOT annoying your potential customers may be one of the most important considerations you make when designing your website. After all, you're in this to market yourself and attract customers, not chase them away.

1. At all costs, avoid Flash graphics, especially intros on the main page of your site. Sure, they look cool.....if you ever sit around long enough for them to load. Flash is one of the most highly overrated and biggest annoyances reported by Internet users. There are much better ways to make your site presentable and professional looking. Flash is not one of them. It is a perfect example of technology alienating its users. Marketing Sherpa found that at least 80% of people hate Flash. In their interview with Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering, it's one of the least user-friendly ways to introduce your website to your consumers. E-Consultancy also has more information on the mistake Fortune 500 companies make in using Flash on their websites.
   Check out the following from Internet users as well:
   I Hate Flash | I Hate Flash | Why I hate Flash? | Consumers Hate Flash  
   In addition to alienating your potential customers, you alienate the search engines. None of the search engines can crawl a website that is Flash-based. Your website can and will remain unindexed by Google and Yahoo! for years. There are so many reasons you just shouldn't do it.


2. Unless you're a band trying to market your new CD, don't make your visitors wait for an audio file to load before they can properly navigate your site. What you think is hot, somebody else definitely thinks is not. In addition to that, it's cheesy! We've come a long way since the good old days when we all had a free Geocities site. No matter how much you love that David Hasselhoff tune, spare your visitors and just give this one a miss.


3. Unless you want your visitors to lapse into an epileptic seizure upon page-load, get rid of the blinking, scrolling text. We cannot stress enough how utterly ugly and unnecessary this is. You want your visitors to be able to read what is on your web page, not go blind trying to do it.


4. Use CSS where ever possible for shots of color. This cuts down on the amount of images you use. Which cuts down on your page-load time. Which makes for happy website visitors.


5. Don't include pages of your dog Bozo and your entire family on your website unless it truly is your family's website. There are not going to be alot of people out there doing a Google search on Mr. Smith's Lovely Family, no matter how lovely it is.


6. Compress the images you do use! There isn't a person alive who wants to sit and wait for your high-res, 1000px by 800px photo of Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary to load. This is something that is guaranteed to make your site visitors run the other way! If you don't know how to compress images, we suggest doing a search through Google on this often ignored topic.


7. Animated gifs, oh how we once loved thee.....not any longer. Once hugely popular and displayed proudly with fluffy pink bunnies and flashing banners (on the same site!), these little gems deserve to be left where they are.....buried!


8. Reuse images whenever possible, calling them up through your CSS, rather than inserting them over and over again, directly into your HTML. Your pages will load much faster.


9. If you're blogging and are a fan of YouTube, do your site visitors a favor and keep to a minimum the amount of YouTube-s you embed in your website. There are alot of fans of YouTube, but there are also alot of website visitors who find it extremely annoying to hit a page that is nothing more than one comment and a page full of junk. Keep the amount you embed in each page to a maximum of three. Don't forget, filling your page with YouTube is not the same as filing it with content. It doesn't make your website worth visiting.


10. Don't Photoshop your site to death. Don't get us wrong. We like Photoshop and use it on a daily basis. But constructing a site's entire look based on a Photoshop image that is sliced up makes for an extremely slow-loading page. Use your graphics wisely!