When considering your website design, pay special attention to details that will help make a positive overall user experience. Try to put yourself in your visitor’s shoes at all times and design a website that’s easy to use and gets straight to the point.

Here are five common website design mistakes to avoid.

1. Leave the splash pages to water parks

Splash pages are those annoying "click here to enter" pages that are sometimes the first page you see when you land on a website. For the most part, they are a pointless aggravation with no purpose other than to show off the overpriced logo that you paid some guy with a black shirt and sideburns to design for your "brand awareness" campaign. Put yourself in your visitor’s shoes. The annoyance factor increases with every click as he tries to find what he is looking for. Splash pages are the DEET of website design. They repel visitors.

2. Don’t confuse your visitor

A common mistake on many websites is that they overwhelm the visitor with too many choices. A page cluttered with bold links, banners, "important" information and tons of things to click on leave the visitor confused about where to start – so they leave your site and head over to your competitor’s less cluttered website. The best website designs have a clear objective in mind and the options available to a visitor should all be in alignment with the website’s objective.

3. Don’t use "experimental" navigation

Yes, your Flash menu might look cool and make nifty rollover sound effects, but leave those nifty experimental menus alone. You must provide a simple menu system that even a first grader could understand. Javascript cascading menus are okay if they lend themselves to a logical organization of content. In fact, building a menu that can transport a visitor to any page on your site in one click is preferred.

4. White space is good

Don’t feel like you have to fill every square inch of screen space with content. The unused "white" space along the vertical edges of your page is actually good form. This white space helps give the reader’s eye a break and allows you to draw focus on the important elements on the page.

5. Don’t make everything "stand out"

If everything is bold, red and flashing, then nothing stands out. Giving a newbie website designer a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor with text formatting capabilities is like locking a four year old in his newly painted bedroom with a fresh pack of permanent markers. A colorful mess is virtually guaranteed and will make your site look amateur and confusing. Exercise control with your fonts, font size and color. A well designed web page should use no more than two font types and colors. If you really must make something stand out, use bold OR italics – not both.