1. There are a lot of tables in your site with little to no CSS.

CSS Advantages Over Tables:

* Make your pages load faster
* Help to maintain visual consistency
* Makes page more accessible
* Lower bandwidth cost
* Helps the web page to be more accessible to agents
* More semantic markup can be applied
* Looks more professional (liquid layout etc)
* No spacing images required
* Decreases the filesize
* More accessible for screen reading software

Still not convinced? Check this great analysis out:

Tables V. CSS

2. Full Flash Entrance Pages

We have all seen them, flash entrance pages. Animations with little value, there simply to introduce the site. It seemed like a good idea back when flash first became popular years ago, a good way to be artistic, and give your site some “flair.” These flash entrance pages proliferated across the internet into near ubiquity. As time went by however, people started to wonder, what do these pages really add to a site? As it turns out the answer is: very little. In fact, flash entrance pages usually do more harm than good. Here are 10 reasons compiled from Mnteractive and Wowwebdesigns telling us why Flash Entrance pages suck, and why if you are still using them, it is time to move on.

1. Flash Re-invents the Interface Wheel: Flash provides authors with a blank slate – anything can be a link. It doesn’t need to be blue, underlined text. It can be a tiny, unsuspecting light, gray dot that customers have to ‘discover’ (they won’t).
2. It isn’t free: Any text editor can create HTML and all computers ship with at least one pre-installed. Flash itself costs between $500 and $700 per computer + $200 annual upgrades + support costs.
3. Customers Can’t Share It: Flash text cannot be selected, copy, pasted, or printed.
4. Businesses Can’t Measure It: Tracking customer usage of HTML-based web sites is easy, typically a single line of code is added to each web site. The RoundTable uses this line < ? php dstats_record(): ?>. Amazon puts their tracking information in the URL string, look for ‘ref=’ next time you’re there. These link level tracking methods are not possible with Flash – so you’ll never know if or how customers interact with the site.
5. Search Engines Have a hard time seeing it: Search Engine robots: Googlebot , Yahoo, MSNbot – only read text. This means the text in your flash probably won’t be read, and will do nothing to help you rank well in the search engines.
6. The back and forward buttons do not work in 100% Flash designs. You simply cannot navigate between individual pages by using these buttons because the whole design is a single Flash object.
7. You must wait to see a Flash object or in some cases a whole web page until that Flash object is completely downloaded. This is usually not true with HTML pages.
8. Some Flash designs make you wait for several seconds to watch a redundant animation every time you click a link. This behavior is not only boring, but also reduces motivation to see sub pages.
9. Some Flash intros take a lot of time to download and most of them provide little more than a bunch of flying logos. There is usually “a skip intro” button included with Flash intros but the requirement of clicking that button every time you visit the site might get tedious.
10. You cannot use the Find feature of your browser (Ctrl+F) that allows you to search a specific piece of text on a web page.

3. Animated Gifs (especially ‘Under Construction’ signs)

Things like this scream “I’m amateur” and “I’m stuck in 1990’s web design” Here are some throwback examples.

4. Non-Web Friendly Copy

The Internet has brought short attention span to a whole new level. If you have something worth writing about online, it is worth putting in an Internet-friendly style.
Well summarized at WebProNews:

Print writing is:

-formally written
-passively read
-linear
-narrative
-dated
-presents a continuous view

Where as Web writing is:

-informally written,
-chunked out (paragraphs separated by space, lots of lists, bullet points etc)
-non-linear
-interactive
-dynamic
-current

5. Old Layout Style

Today’s best web sites focus on professional looking graphics, clean lines and making the site easy on the eyes.

Modern page design has the following elements:

* Simple layout
* Centered orientation
* Design the content, not the page
* Plenty of white space

So stay away from older layout styles especially elements like:

*left justification
*liquid layout (full page)
*complicated/inconsistent navigation
*tiny text
*poor/stock graphics
*crowded pages with little white space

6. Background Music

There is almost nothing more annoying than background music that started on page load and difficult or almost impossible to turn off.
This can be especially frustrating if you have multiple windows open, finding the one with the annoying music is incredibly frustrating.
It’s time to dump this annoying site element and remnant from the earlier days of the internet.

7. Cliched Stock Images

Now here is a way to NOT set yourself apart. Using cliched stock photo’s like these:

These will never make your web site better. Stock photos are almost always overused and out of touch. Take your own pictures, give your site a more personalized feel. And who wants to look at the same stock photos on every business related site they visit?

8. Old Color Pallets

There are a multiplicity of tools to help you pick a color scheme that works well. There is no longer an excuse for mismatched colors.
If you really want to be modern, try these colors on for size.

http://www.colourlovers.com/

http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/web-2.0-colour-palette

9. Using Text in a Logo

Is there really ever a good excuse for having text in an image? Unless it is part of your logo, or you require a very specialized look
that can not be duplicated with regular text. Other than this, there are no advantages to using images with text instead of ACTUAL TEXT. Images are not crawled by spiders therefore they do nothing for your position in search engines. (they can crawl alt tags, but few make use of them)

10. Browser Pop-Ups

Pop ups used to be an effective tool for enhancing a web site and advertising. However, over the past few years people have become increasingly intolerant to pop ups. Not only to they have horrible conversion rates for advertisers, but they annoy users more than almost
anything else. Additionally most browsers are now bundled with popup blocking features, so your users will be lucky if they see your popup’s at all.

Bottom line: Don’t annoy your visitors with ancient, annoying, ineffective popups.

Bonus 1: Distracting backgrounds

Think of the problems with myspace today, gaudy complicated backgrounds that obscure text or distract and detract from the content on the page
If your site resembles anything like what you see in the majority of myspace pages. It’s time for an update.

Bonus 2: Lack of social media, RSS, bookmarking links

We are in a new age of the internet, it is time to start adopting these new technologies. Make it easy for your users to share your site with the rest of the world. Integrate Social Media buttons, and you will not only catch up with the times, but also see a great bump in site popularity over time.

Need help? Check this out:

http://www.addthis.com/