The Internet has changed a lot in the last 20 years. From Yahoo! Chat Rooms to Facebook, Dogpile to Google, GeoCities to Wordpress.com, and Yahoo! Photos to Instagram, the World Wide Web has matured at a blazing-fast rate, and this has left some early adopters dust. Many ideals about what made a profitable site in the late 1990's would be considered a cheat sheet for how NOT to build a website today.
Unfortunately, having grown up with these websites ourselves, it can sometimes be difficult to recognize that our website is out of date or not following modern best practices. Trends change all the time, and it's hard to know which ones will yield the best results. So how do we stop ourselves from falling into the pitfalls of out-dated website design?