Any website with this type of graphic element turns visitors off. A website logo or banner should be a static graphic or text element on page. Online marketing surveys consistently report that animated icons and graphics on a website do not convey professionalism to visitors.

Sin #7 Hit counters Only used by amateurs. Take them off your website. Please. Any decent webhost can provide you with traffic stats which will provide much more accurate information than a hit counter ever could.

Having a hit counter on your website was a good idea 8 years ago. The online world has moved on. You should too.

Sin #8 Use Their Own Language The reading ability of average website surfer is in or around highschool level. If you're next Shakespeare that's fine just don't force your visitors to read through mountains of prose that confuses them. Speak to your visitors as you'd expect they speak to each other.

Your website content needs to follow model of TV adverts. Short and snappy. Use catchy writing. Write to be remembered. Write to entertain. Put yourself in shoes of surfer. What type of language and slang would they expect to find on your site. Then simply use their own language.

There's an old rule of sales:

"If I could see through John Smiths eyes I could sell John Smith what

John Smith buys".

Design your website for your visitors and not for you.

One very common way to keep your e-mail address from being harvested is to use JavaScript. The only problem with this technique is that some people have JavaScript turned off and won't be able to use this feature.

Here are three JavaScripts that you can use.

This is simplest script you can use.

Replace YOUREMAIL with your e-mail address, like JeffColburn and replace YOURDOMAIN with your domain name, like CreativeCauldron. Then paste this JavaScript wherever you want your e-mail address to appear

The following JavaScript will create a text link.

The link will look like JeffColburn@CreativeCauldron.com

This next inline JavaScript lets you create your link text. Just replace Your Link Text with whatever you want displayed on your website. It can be, Click here to e-mail, My e-mail address, or whatever you want.

Your Link Text

Tim Williams has an interesting solution to e-mail harvesting problem by turning your e-mail address into ISO-Latin-1 code. Take a look at http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trw/spam/spam.htm

If you're feeling adventurous, go to http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorial/Protecting-Your-Users-Email-Addresses-with-PHP-and-MySQL/639 and you will find a tutorial that will tell you how to hide your e-mail address using PHP.

This should give you a good arsenal of weapons against having your e-mail address harvested, and cut down on your daily dose of spam. But remember to keep current with anti-spam techniques. Spamers will eventually find a way around these measures so you'll want to stay one step ahead of them.