Why is it about web sites that suck?

Why is nobody visiting our web site?  Despite vast amounts of work, some web sites are not worth visiting.  Take a fresh look, or better yet, show your pages to someone who doesn't fear telling you the truth.  For a lighthearted approach, read Web Pages that Suck.
What are the worst things that can go wrong?  Crashing somebody's computer with your cutesy Java applet is considered bad.  Also high on the list of no-no's is anything that consumes too much bandwidth.  Even with more and more people going to cable access, if your pages are generally more than 45 kilobytes (KB), that includes graphics, then you have an Slug Web Site.  Graphics can be lean, fast, and beautiful, but it takes hard work.  Web site developers like to use the fanciest computers on the highest speed modems, even network connections.  When you tell the developer that you can't see anything, the response is sometimes, "Oh, it's your computer."  Guess what?  Over 40% of web visitors have their monitors set for 255 colors.  Would you rather berate them to adjust their monitors, or design your site a notch below the cutting edge?  That's a loaded question, and the true answer depends on the audience.  We could design web pages that look somewhat good on 16-color monitors.  It is possible.  But probably not worth the sacrifice for the 98%+ of the audience who are better equipped.  There are JavaScript image replacement options to solve some of the problems of color compatibility, but they are rarely used.  At Open Veld, we use multiple image optimization tools to try to make GIF images 100% compatible with 256-color monitors.  But even this approach falls apart when GIF images and JPEG images occur on the same page, as is sometimes necessary.  The problem is that the JPEGs can sometimes "rob" colors from the 255 available on the older monitors, and then replace colors on the GIF images to stay within the same restricted palette.
Monitor variations.  Monitor resolution is another touchy problem.  Many people, 40-50% of all web surfers, set their monitors' desktop resolution to 800 x 600 pixels.  Some even go as low as even 640 x 480.  This includes not just older people with poor vision who want to see big letters, but also kids who like to virtually "sit in the front row."  Most probably do no realize that, if font size is their concern, this can be adjusted from the browser preferences.  Another group has gotten adjusted to whatever settings were present when they bought their system, and not explored further.  But in either case, the problem is "Horizontal scrolling."  As if vertical scrolling were not bad enough, horizontal scrolling means that the viewer must sometimes go back and forth for every line of text.  It increases the feeling of being stuck in a tunnel.
Among webmasters there are two camps to resolving the problem of resolution.  There are the absolutists and the relativists.  The absolutists form the page content in a centered table, with absolute pixel width.  This wastes a lot of space on either side, when the same page is viewed with larger desktop areas such as 1024 x 768 pixels or higher settings.  But it provides some assurance that the designer's creation will remain intact.  The relativists, on the other hand, let text flow around tables and images depending on whatever resolution is used.  This can create problems when tables and images are set too closely together, because the browser must sometimes resolve illogical consequences.  Depending on the alignments for text and images, relativist placement can result in text running over the tops of images, or vice-versa.  The most hazardous combinations involve using the cascading style sheet code "Justify," which can force the right margin of text into places it's not intended to go.  At Open Veld we prefer the relativist approach, but structure our pages as tables within tables, which can prevent most kinds of overlap problems.
Browser variations.  The second problem is a similar to the problem of the client monitors.  It is browser differences.  Every time people agree on a standard, Netscape and Microsoft go off to implement features that make their browser a little different.  Don't expect this to change.  Again, try to hit a common denominator, by designing your web pages a notch below the cutting edge.  When the present versions of cascading style sheets are surpassed by newer versions, the present versions will be commonplace, and function most of the time.
Valid code.  For every person who reports a problem with your web, probably 999 will go away in disgust.  Besides checking your pages in different combinations of browser-monitor-operating system, make sure your code is valid.  For free you can submit pages to any number of monitoring services, e.g., http://w3.org or for a larger list go to http://www.flfsoft.com/html/html_validators.html