You Know You're In Design Hell When You See...

 blinking text
 Blinking text makes it nearly impossible to pay attention to anything else
 on the page. It reduces 87% of all surfers to a helpless state of fixated
 brain-lock, much like that of a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming
 semi. This is not good. If you abuse the blink tag, you deserve to be shot.
 Clue: if you use the blink tag, you're abusing it.
 
 gratuitous animation
 With animations you get the all the wonderful injuries of the blink tag
 with the added insult of the graphics download time. People who abuse these
 should have flip books rammed into every body orifice until they figure out
 that a two- or three-frame graphics loop is even less pleasant than
 that.
 
 marquees
 So, maybe you think the blink tag and cheesy animations are the worst
 abuse half-bright websmiths can perpetrate on your retinas? Naaahhhhh. For
 those times when too much is just not enough, the Great Satan of Redmond has
 given us <MARQUEE>, which allows you to create animated scrolling
 marquees at the drop of an angle bracket. This bastard cousin of the blink tag
 can cause vertigo and seizures in susceptible individuals, reducing them to
 exactly that state of drooling lobotomized idiocy that's such an essential
 prerequisite to purchasing Microsoft products. Coincidence? We think not.
 
 garish backgrounds
 The very next time we stumble across a page composed by somebody who
 thinks it's cool to use leaping flames or a big moire pattern or seven shades
 of hot pink swirly as a background, we swear we are going to reach right
 through the screen and rip out that festering puke's throat. If there's a
 worse promoter of eyestrain and migraines than the blink tag, this is it.
 
 unreadable text/background combinations
 The world is full of clowns who think their text pages look better in
 clown makeup, clashing colors galore (your typical garish-background idiot
 also pulls this one a lot). The magic words these losers need to learn are
 "luminance contrast". Your color sense is between you and the Gods of Bad
 Taste, but if you don't stick to either light text on dark backgrounds or the
 reverse, you will drive away surfers who like to be able to read
 without noticing the effort.
 
 brushscript headings
 Brushscript headings are rude. Unless, that is, you think every single
 surfer hitting your page truly craves the opportunity to hang out long enough
 to watch toenails grow while a brushscript GIF downloads just to display a
 heading you could have uttered in a nice, tasteful, fast font.
 
 "resize your browser to..." instructions
 Right. As if we wanted our browsers to take up that big a chunk of screen
 real estate. But what's really annoying is that most of the time these bozos
 get it wrong. Like, their browser has an 8-pixel offset, ours eats 20, and
 they forgot to allow for scroll bars so they're off by at least 30 pixels
 anyway and the display graphics are complete garbage.


You Know You're In Content Hell When You See...

 hit counters
 "You are the 2,317th visitor to this page." Yeah, like we care. On Yahoo's
 and Alta Vista's web it takes no effort at all to find and bounce off every
 page on the planet with a reference to (say) credenzas or toe jam. In this
 brave new world, hit counters are nothing but a particularly moronic form of
 ego display, impressing only the lemming-minded. They may tell you how many
 people got suckered into landing on a glitzy splash page, but they won't even
 hint how many muttered "losers!" and surfed out again faster than you can say
 "mouse click". To add injury to insult, hit counters screw up page caching,
 heaping more load on the Internet's wires.
 
 stale links
Stale links are lame. People who have lots of stale links are lamers. OK,
 everybody has a pointer vaporize on them once in a while -- but haven't you
 noticed that stale links generally show up on a page in swarms, like
 cockroaches? That's because people with good web pages use them and
 hack them and fix broken pointers quickly so they're unlikely to have more
 than one at a time busted. A page with lots of stale links yells "My author is
 a lazy, out-of-it loser with the attitude of a slumlord running a cockroach
 palace."
 
 pages forever under construction
 Surfers learn quickly that for every ten "under construction" signs that
 go up, maybe two will ever come down before the heat-death of the Universe.
 This is stupid. HTML is not rocket science and prototyping pages is not a slow
 process. Anybody who can't find the time to clean the construction signs off
 their pages should yank them and take up a hobby better matched to their
 abilities, like (say) drooling, or staring at the wall.


You Know You're In Style Hell When You See...

pointless vanity pages
 If we had a nickel for every home page we've seen that's a yawn-inducing
 variation on "Hi, here's me and here's a cute picture of my
 dog/cat/boyfriend/girlfriend" we could retire to Aruba with a bevy of
 supermodels tomorrow. Clue: if you don't have something to say, shut
 up. And keep it off the Web; life is too short for boredom.
 
 angst and pretentiousness
 We were originally going to vent our spleen at black backgrounds, until we
 realized that black is not the problem. It's the three overlapping populations
 of losers that compose 99% of the black backgrounds on the Web that are the
 problem. These are (a) cooler-than-thou art fags, (b) angst-ridden
 adolescents, and (c) the kind of coffeehouse trendoids who actually believe
 subscribing to Wired makes them hip. Clue: angst and
 pretentiousness are boring. People who spew bad poetry and/or
 make a fetish of writing in all-smalls and/or traffic in fuzzy images of
 mediocre avant-garde art should slit their wrists or join a commune or do
 anything else that will keep their self-indulgent sludge off the Web.
 
 corporate logorrhea
We've all seen them -- corporate pages that start by downloading some
 monster logo graphic from hell. And after you've waited a million or three
 years for it to finish, the rest of the page has a ton of gush about how
 wonderful the company is, maybe some lame-oid promotion that's just a hook to
 get you on their mailing list, and <I>no content at all</I>. Tip for
 marketroids: this is <I>not</I> effective, unless your goal is to make the
 company look like every other moronic me-too outfit that thinks having a Web
 address will make it look like it has some semblance of a clue. Not!

 advertisements from hell
 Don't you love top of the page ads that are changed every time the page is
 accessed? If you're jumping back and forth between a parent page and a child
 devoted to a subcategory, you get the dubious pleasure of waiting for a new ad
 graphic to load each time!

 no email address for feedback
 These folks want you to look and listen to them, but they don't want to
 hear from you. Isn't it interesting that half the Web pages of Fortune 500
 companies, the big names like McDonald's, won't tell you what their email
 address is? Shows you just how much these gutless wonders really
 value their customers. Another tip for marketroids: this sort of thing makes
 your company look exactly as arrogant, stupid, and indifferent to its
 customers as it actually is. Think of an email feedback address as a sort of
 necessary disguise.
 
You Know You're In Extension Hell When You See...

 broken HTML
 A lot of broken HTML gets inflicted on the world because it happens to get
 past the brain-damaged `parser' of everyone's favourite bloatware web browser.
 The designer gets the perversity prize if he can provoke radically different
 behaviour in different browsers or browser versions.
 
unstable extensions
 We just love it when our browser freezes while loading a page, hangs for a
 while, and then ignominiously coredumps. When this happens, you can bet money
 the page is using a Netbloat extension nobody ever bothered to debug properly
 (there are a semi-infinite number of these). The worst offender is
 undoubtedly...
 
frames
 Frames are for idiots. They flat don't work on many browsers, and
 core-dump many they're theoretically supposed to work in. They eat up precious
 screen space with frame widget cruft. And, used with sufficient ingenuity,
 they make it almost impossible to work out where you've been and how to get
 back to where you got there from.
Due to the design of this site, frames were a must. The key point is, frames should not be used when it is not necesary. Frames eat up loading times and kill search engines. Sorry, but we do use frames. However, we are currently working to redesign the realm for a frame-less site.

Improving your web page
"Okay," I hear you saying, "so you've given me
good advice on how not to screw up. Have you got anything more positive to say?
Like, good things to do and how I can improve my page?
For you, my friend, I have three words. Content, content, and content. Give the audience a reason to
care. Too many web pages are like tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Do
you want to be interesting? Then forget the graphics and the glitz. First and
foremost, have something to say.

Suggestions?
Got your own gripe about poor HTML design?
Mail it to me!

Other Good Advice
There's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio.
Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's
column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. Also see the Ten Commandments of Web
Design.