I like the clean design of this upscale spa’s homepage.

I was recently on a salon website (I don’t want to embarrass the owner by saying which one) and it had me squinting to the point that I eventually give up on it entirely. The site used a fancy cursive font in an effort to appear quaint, I think, and to give it a personal touch. The resulting web pages were difficult and occasionally impossible to read.

It got me thinking about web “don’ts.” Thanks to Google, I quickly zeroed in on a really good list of do’s and don’ts at http://www.secretsites.com/do_dont_part1.jsp . If you have a website and want to make sure it looks professional, I recommend you scan the article in its entirety. But here, in brief, are some of the no-no’s I thought were worth passing along:

• No page counters.

• Forget blinking or flashing text.

• Don’t try any stupid cheat tricks in an attempt to fool the search engines.

• Don’t waste your time on Flash intros.

• Don’t use background music on your web pages.

• Don’t create automatic pop-up windows.

• Don’t center everything on your web pages.

• Don’t use busy backgrounds on your pages.

• Don’t set your type to all capital letters in your body text.

• Don’t have more than a few words in italics.

• Don’t have more than a few words in a bold case.

• Don’t use too many colors in your website.

— Judy