Do you want a successful website? First, ask yourself, what is the purpose of your electronic presence? Is it marketing, information dissemination, or e-commerce? If it's a little bit of each, which is the main focus? If all you want is marketing, then by all means test the boundaries of 16 million color graphics and make your home page look like a funky 1960's pastel couch. Simplicity is the key to information dissemination and e-commerce. Let's take a look at some cardinal problems.

1) Wrong Website Names. I can't tell you what the right domain name is for your site, only you can. But you must give it some thought. A good analogy comes from television programs. What do 90210 and Melrose Place indicate? Poverty and suffering or beauty, riches, and people in style? What does your domain name make people think about? Is it too complex, like www.no-one-will-type-this.com? Or is it completely irrelevant to your audience, like www.groovydog.com --- maybe this is okay if you are a veterinarian or pet breeder, but don't use a college nick name for business. Finally, if at all possible keep the name short. The phone company didn't pick seven digits for our phone numbers by random chance. I wonder if the tea people at www.celestialseasonings.com thought about that? Merrill Lynch obviously did, and their site is www.ml.com.

2) Ignoring the Halo Effect. Please dump the bloated graphics. Does anything make you click out of a site faster than a 400k image map on the home page? How about blinking text or scrolling marquees? These dinosaurs need to leave websites, like Cadillac shed tail fins. Next to a domain name, your home page creates the greatest halo effect. It's the first impression people will get of your site. If they want to share it with others, that's the page they will print and give to others in the office or the Rotary Club. Make it attractive to bookmark, and have a reasonable title that people will be able to read later when they check their favorite places. Nothing is worse than trying to find a site you surfed two months ago, and all you see in the bookmark list is "home page index," "remote software," or "World 1000," all of which I have encountered.

3) Mismatched Branding. Make sure your site is an extension of your whole marketing image. I saw a religious group's website complete with animation and a fully decked-out site that must have cost a few hundred thousand dollars to create (let alone maintain), and on their home page was a solicitation for donations. I wondered if my ten bucks would have helped the poor or just contributed to another screen with java applets? In the same light, be careful of your sponsors. I don't expect to see cigar ads on the American Lung Association page. On the flip side, I'd be surprised if you didn't link to similar sites. Many groups have started banding together in virtual malls called webrings, where like-minded sites can cross advertise their sites. Go one step further, and don't just link, but ask other groups if they have a classy button or banner you can use if they'll post one of yours. Of course, it goes without saying, make sure your site has a good banner to share.

4) Registration Hell. Okay, someone in your office said that no one is going to be able to look at one precious marketing or sales document until your clients register. They go to your home page only to find fifty neat things they'd like to click on, but first they have to tell about how many kids they have, their shopping tendencies, and whether or not they have three Corvettes and two poodles. Think about it. When was the last time you filled out one of those ridiculous things? In fact, registration pages right off the home page are a surefire recipe to kill a site. The only successful ones give things away, like Jelly Belly at www.jellybelly.com. Jelly Belly has a few screens that you need to go through, but every day they mail out hundreds of Jelly Belly packets. I've received two, and every once in awhile I go back just to see if they have new free offers. If you are going to make people register, give them a free gift, whether it's a pen, button, pin, brochure, coupon, or jelly beans.

5) Junk Email Purgatory. Second only to registration hell, junk email is a main force in drowning a successful website and reversing any positive halo effect. I love the anti-spam site spam.abuse.net and their educational program towards unsolicited email. If you do happen to receive a client's email, either because they emailed a comment to the webmaster or you found it from one of their corporate brochures, do not email them junk email. A positive way to offer targeted email and manage mailing lists is with ListBot at www.listbot.com. ListBot provides a useful and free mailing list service where clients can request to join your site, but here is the important part. They are emailed a notice from ListBot confirming their desire to be a part of your site's mailing list. Now they don't feel intruded upon, and ListBot gives them the ability to unsubscribe from your list. You can even add suggested email addresses to your list, and ListBot will send them a notice asking them if they would like to subscribe. I'd rather have 1000 clients who wanted my electronic notices than 5000 who felt bothered by my well intentioned intrusion.

6) No Unique Viewers. Nothing is worse for a website than to have 10 viewers and no outside press. Is your domain name printed on your stationery and business cards? It should be. Do you need to have a fifty-thousand dollar advertising budget to get noticed? Not at all -- a new company, ClickTrade at www.clicktrade.com, is offering banner advertising based on clicks (not impressions) for just nickels, dimes, and quarters. How does it work? You put in a hundred dollars or so into your account, and then post how much you are willing to pay a site (per click) to put on your banner. Other websites in the ClickTrade program send you a notice requesting to be your host, and you approve or reject their account. If you approve, they put on a banner linking to your site. You get free impression views -- that is, anyone who looks at their page but does not click on your banner -- that's free. If someone actually has an interest to click on your site, then it costs you a dime or quarter. This is a great way to get the word out to hundreds of small sites without coming up with a five-digit advertising budget. ClickTrade gets 30% of the action, so a dime click costs you thirteen cents. Still, it's not a bad investment compared to advertising on Sunday's NFL games.

7) Dynamic Death Pages. The latest rage in the web business is dynamic HTML -- that is, creating new HTML pages on the fly. Netcom is famous for this, with their state of the art technical support pages that have an "expired on" date reminiscent of a beer commercial. Their philosophy is they don't want anyone to bookmark their support page, because information changes. But sometimes viewers do need to come back to the same place. Instead, Netcom forces them to start at their home page. This may be acceptable if you have a captive audience, but certainly it is not ideal for an e-commerce site. More importantly, search engines won't log temporary pages. Do you want to be ignored by HotBot and Yahoo? Probably not. One of my favorite wineries Beaulieu Vineyards at www.bv-wine.com, had a tendency to do that, but now at least they have an option to bookmark www.bv-wine.com/home.html as a stable home page.

Dean S. Tripodes teaches the Webmaster class at the University of California at Irvine. He also teaches Computer Science at Marymount College in Palos Verdes and Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. He can be reached at webmaster@baywalk.com.