• Slowly loading home page
A site's home page loads slowly because it includes large graphics file, time-consuming videos, or sound and music.

• Inscrutable or inappropriate graphics
This goes hand-in-hand with the first sign. The last thing I want to see on a website is an other group of "regular folks" looking up and out at me from my computer screen with that Lilliputian pose that tries to make me feel 14 feet tall.

• Cumbersome navigation
Websites that provide too many navigation options or complex menus and hidden links are often good examples of sites that need to be simplified. It's very easy to fall into the trap of creating a good website that provides useful content and features only to have the site fail because the navigation is so poor.

• Emphasis on the amount of content instead of its accuracy or relevance
When you think of the cost of printing and publishing its easy to see why people get the perception that putting up content on a website is free or doesn't require much in the way of resources. Many companies go wild in this respect and try to put up every bit of information they can get their hands on.

• Lack of focus
The larger a site becomes, the more often it loses focus, and then it becomes apparent that its owner has tried to do too much with it. A site that is designed to be a store shouldn't be an online magazine. A site that is a help center for a company's products shouldn't bogged down providing investor relations or financial information about the company.

• Search time hogs
In the early days of websites, most users and designers would measure the success of a good website design in terms of how fast a home page or other critical pages would load. If, for example, a designer created a site with a home page that could load in two seconds, he might brag to his friends how great his website is.

• The "Where should I click?" syndrome
A bloated site can be like a shared refrigerator in a group house occupied by three or more recent college grads. Everyone carves out a niche: "This is my ice cream" and "Don't touch my tofu" labels litter the interior. On an overloaded website, instead of "Where's the mayonnaise?" the visitor wonders, "Where should I click?" The telltale signs are flashing graphics or scrolling text; links to unrelated side business, partners, and affiliates; clutter; and chaos. For the visitor, the reaction may be stomach-turning. The only remedy may be to clean it out and start over.

• Designed based on the org chart
Business that don't stop to think about what visitors to their site might want fall back on one of the most common and ineffective web design strategies out there: Creating a website that mirrors the way they see themselves rather than how their customers see them. Then, when someone has the bright idea to put something on the site that visitors might want, the text or graphic or link gets wedged into a place it wasn't meant to go. Wash, rinse, and repeat- the bloated site is born.