Your website is a double-edged sword: it can help you or it can cut you. Here are some surefire things to do if you'd rather sink your business than grow it.

1. Bombard your customers with corporate talk about how great your company is
In reality, nobody gives a damn about your company's mission statement, or your dedication to perfection. Guess what: Everyone else's website says the same thing. Your website needs to actually provide value to your customer. Give them something that's worth their time for visiting your website. This might be in the form of useful information, or a set of resources they didn't know about. Don't just give them a fancy logo, corporate slogan, and pages of your personal achievements. They don't care for it.


2. Use as much Flash Animation as possible
If there's one thing your visitors will love to do, it's wait 30 seconds for your cool Flash animation to load. Then once it loads, they'll be blown away by the animated leaves that blow over your logo, to reveal your cool company name. Nobody cares for this. You have less than 3 seconds to impress a customer (not 30). If your poindexter computer guy insists on using Flash, get a new guy (or scare the first one straight with pictures of girls). Another awesome feature of Flash is that search engines can't read the text inside it, which means it has no idea what you're talking about. If it can't understand your text, it won't index it, and this will cost you visitors. Other than all the negatives above, Flash is fantastic!


3. Insist on collecting each visitor's contact information through annoying pop-up adds
Does anyone enjoy having to continually close these pop-up windows? This is almost like an immunization to ensure that your site doesn't contract the success virus. Avoid it like Jenny McCarthy would.


4. Use a font/background combination that nobody can read
Nothing goes better on a white background than light gray text right? Visitors love straining their eyes, or having to highlight the text to read it. This is a great way to get rid of potential customers as quickly as possible. If you feel like keeping your visitors, use a strong contrast (black text on white, white text on black, etc). This saves your visitor's eyes (and temper)


5. Hide your links so that nobody can find them
Visitors love to inspect every pixel of the screen to find your links right? Of course not. So make sure your menus and links are easy to find, and easy to read. Keep a menu bar in a static position (don't move it around). If you want your visitors to view more than one page of your site, make sure they can find the rest of it

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