Layout & navigation
My personal pet peeve it attractive sites, with good content that have illogical layout and obscure navigation titles that their visitors won't understand half of.
Maybe it sounds rude, but many people forget when designing a site that their potential visitors don't know what they know. It is part of our human nature. We know what the page titled "Our Natural Advantage" is about... it doesn't even occur to us that "Jo Bloggs" doesn't.
To illustrate my point: I recently re-designed a site that was originally converted from a printed publication. One page in the booklet was titled "Our Natural Advantage", and dealt with the natural wonders and "feel" of Pemberton, the place the booklet was about. The original designers had simply used the book and content "as is" and made it into a web site.
While the original title worked fine in a printed brochure where you see the relevant pictures at the same time as you read the title, on a web site navigation it became vague and meaningless. The same was true for the overall layout. Sure there was a navigation bar, but it was disordered and uninformative. This meant that the content which was otherwise sound, was harder to access.
So I guess my point is, try detach your self from what you "know" when you design & layout a site. Put yourself in the shoes of "Jo Bloggs" who knows nothing when planning and laying out your site, and build it from the ground up with the intention of making it what I call "idiot proof".
Don't be too shocked, even though I try my best, the amount of times I have had clients joke with me about recieving emails from web visitors saying "we couldn't find your address ANYWHERE on your site" when it was clearly listed on their "Contact" page is staggering!
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