Websites have been around for so long, we imagine everyone has gotten the hang of the basic rules of usability. But apparently they didn’t! So here are three important things you should consider if you care about your visitors at all. And you should care, especially if you’re selling something through your website.

1. Stop making the www compulsory! People are lazy. They will always prefer to type name.com instead of www.name.com. Yes, most websites respect this rule, but there are still some parts of the Internet where people like to pretend it ain’t that important. It is! People will think your site is down first, then consider other possibilities, like needing to type three more letters.

2. Your site should at least work on major browsers! That’s IE and Firefox. Don’t believe me? Check your Google analytics or whatever tracking software you’re using. See what browsers your visitors are using. And make sure your site works on the most frequently used ones. If it just works on IE, you’ll let a lot of people down.

3. Don’t make advertising more annoying than it already is! Yes, we have come to ignore most ads. So stop making them extremely annoying by allowing them to impair navigation on your site. If you add a close button to an ad, then it should work, the ad should not open again when I try to click a menu button.

These rules are based on what I find most annoying when browsing online and trying to dig information on websites. What would you add to the list?