This article will discuss some useful tips concerning custom website design. These tips are based on our review of many websites out there, and while they are numbered they are not listed in any particular order. This article is more for web designers than people looking to have a website created. Are you ready? Her we go!

Don't include a splash screen or an intro page on your site.

That is, don't have an intro page that requires or allows visitors to "Enter" or "Skip intro,". Splash screens and intro pages are outdated techniques that waste bandwidth and waste user mouse clicks. (It is our opinion that the most important content on your site should be reachable in three mouse clicks or less.)

Don't make an all Flash website.

Now I know, I know. They are pretty to look at with all the animations and graphics. By creating an entire website in FLASH you are making customs wait to load your site in its entirety everytime they visit. Don't make visitors wait for your site to download every time they visit it. Don't make them scroll down to see the last three lines of a block of text. (That "dinosaur" — as one designer disparagingly called it — known as HTML has the amazing ability to dynamically accommodate any amount of text vertically because the webpage can expand vertically.) Don't make them squint to read text on your all Flash site because you set the text to 8 point font size and gave visitors no way to increase the size.
Instead, make your site with HTML and embed Flash movies to do what Flash does best: animations and audio/video. (But see next item, too.)

Don't make visitors to your church website see the same animations over and over again in Flash movies.

Figure out a way, using cookies and/or session variables, to turn off your fancy animations (once you've impressed visitors with your incredible skills and talent) and stop wasting visitors' time. They've come for information.

Don't use frames.

Frames have fallen out of favor among website designers, and further, cause problems for the screen readers that blind people use to browse websites. Notice that the bottom right quadrant scrolls up and down, while the top and left stay put. That's done with "frames." Now, you might think there's some merit to this concept, and indeed there is. However, just trust me when I say that use of frames is out of date. Don't do it.

There are many other tips out there. Feel free to post your own below!