- Extremely popular celebrities & bands. People are tired of looking at Ashlee Simpson, Panic! at the Disco, Paris Hilton and Hillary Duff.
- Itsy bitsy layouts. Two-column layouts with 9 pixel text and an overall width of around 300-400 pixels. If people can’t read your entries, they are less likely to comment or come back.
- Dinosaurs, robots, and speech bubbles that have “#!!!@” in them aren’t unique anymore. They’re extremely played-out.
- Music that automatically plays. You might love that song by Kelly Clarkson, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world does. Besides, what if a visitor is browsing late at night and forgets to turn their speakers down?
- Pop-Up advertising. Don’t do it unless you are offering a huge amount of high-bandwidth content. Stick with text-based ads if you must. I recommend clicksor, because Google makes you earn $100 before they will pay you.
- Flash menus. Flash can be tricky in certain resolutions or browsers, and you can’t expect everyone to install flash just to view your site. If you use flash, use it for things that aren’t vital to navigating your site. If you do have a flash menu, have a second text-based one.
- High-contrast text. Don’t put hot pink text on a lime green background. It’s hard to read and looks tacky. To use fluorescent colors correctly, accent the layout with white, black or grey.
You should use your best work for layouts. If you stink at doing vexels, don’t make a vexel layout! If your strong points are blending or colorizing photos… then stick with that. It’s good to experiment, but experiment with wallpapers, not your main page.
