By Mitone Griffith

Even if you're not an accomplished webmaster you can still
have a professional looking website. You may be like I was
five years ago'you're teaching yourself web design and
you're starting to catch on to that HTML stuff. You're so
excited about your new bag of tricks'but slow down partner,
sometimes less is more. In fact the only time more is more
is when it concerns chocolate cheesecake or something like
that. (I can never get enough chocolate!)

You've worked hard to get the traffic'now don't drive them
away.

1. Fatal Flaw One'Bouncing, Wiggling Animated Clip Art

This one is really annoying to website visitors, and a sure
sign you don't know what you're doing, especially if you
have them all over the place. Just because they're free,
doesn't mean you should use them.

SOLUTION'You're probably not a graphics designer if you
resort to using clip art, so don't worry about your
weakness, just choose a nice color scheme instead in your
tables. (More on that later.) Colors don't take extra time
to download either.

2. Fatal Flaw Two'Embedded Music Clips
Good grief. Don't
do this. I don't care how catchy your elevator tune is. No
one wants to hear it. Sometimes speakers are turned up and a
sudden blare of music will scare the heck out of your
visitors. They'll probably leave!

SOLUTION'If you have a site that sells music, then people
will expect to hear it sometime somewhere at your site. Make
your music links clickable'a choice that visitors can make
to listen!

3. Fatal Flaw Three'Unstructured Text
I can't stand it
when I land on a site that I have to read from each side of
my screen to the other left and right as well as up and
down. Even if you want to write one long sales letter'which
obviously works fine for hundreds of rich webmasters, you
still need to format it into a legible width.

SOLUTION'Put your text in one single data cell of a simple
table. Center your table. Voila.

4. Fatal Flaw Four'Out of Control Scroll
Similar to number
three, is the out of control scroll. This is when you have
to scroll text left to right as well as up and down. This
happens when newbies design their websites larger than 800
pixels wide.

SOLUTION'Most people view resolution at 800x600. Set your
table widths around 750 and everyone will be able to look at
your site without using a bottom scrollbar.

5. Fatal Flaw Five'Gargantuan Images
This is when newbies
take photos directly off their scanner or digital camera
without resizing and without compressing. And nothings worse
than landing on a page that has an image taking over the
whole screen, taking forever to download.

SOLUTION'Using a photo program like Paint Shop, Photo Shop
or other, resize images to fit in the table you intend to
put it in. (Usually under 500 pixels wide.) Compress to 72
dots per inch. (DPI) Photos scanned or taken for print are
large and usually at 300 dpi'no one wants to wait on those!

6. Fatal Flaw Six'Nonsense Affiliate Links
This is the
same as "sites with no value." There's nothing that looks
more like a newbie did it than a page full of banners,
buttons, and text links taking visitors away from the
Newbie's site.

SOLUTION'At least publish free articles on the topic of your
affiliate program. For example, let's say you've signed up
for a "make money selling traffic" idea. There are thousands
of free articles that you can publish on getting more
website traffic. Put your affiliate link at the bottom, top,
or middle of the page the article is published on. Not only
will having content make your site more interesting, it will
also make your site more valuable to search engines.

These are just 6 little mistakes. But if you can at least
change these, you are well on your way to having a more
saleable site!

Mitone Griffith has been designing
websites since 1999. Her streamlined 24 Hour Website Wizard
will assist you in getting your website running in less time
than it would take to get that book on HTML to ship from
Amazon. Give her Wizard 24 hours. Invest a low $199. You'll
have a complete and custom website overnight. You've got
nothing to lose. 100% satisfaction money back guarantee.
Just visit http://24hourwebsitewizard.com to learn more, or
email to thewiz@24hourwebsitewizard.com.