Don't add bells and whistles just because you can, or because you figure out how to do it. Most are just a distraction, adding nothing of value to your site. More often than not, they brand you as an amateur. You may, indeed, be an amateur. But you don't need to shout it from the rooftops.

Remember: your website visitors don't care about fancy stuff. They came looking for something--it's probably not the current weather--and that's all they care about. Don't distract them from their search with flashing animations, scrolling text, popup windows, and what-have-you.

Here are some bells and whistles to avoid.

Counters. They are free, easy to install, and come in all kinds of varieties. There are visitors counters, hit counters, page-view counters. But they betray you as an amateur, add nothing of value to your site, and clutter the page with a cheesy graphics. No professional web designer uses page counters.

Animations. Advertisers use animations to grab your attention, wanting to lure you to an entirely different site. But if you're trying to read, and something on the page keeps flashing or moving, it's really distracting. As a result, reading comprehension suffers. So don't do that on your church site.

Scrolling text. Don't be delighted upon learning how to scroll text in the browser's status bar. That trick has long since entered the ranks of the "gimmick." Don't use it.  

Registering. Don't make people register before they can enter your site or receive certain information. People don't like that. If you want to send people something, the second-least intrusive route is to ask for their email address and nothing else. The least intrusive: make it available so they can download it without jumping through any hoops.

Anytime someone is asked to give their email address, they instinctively think, "Marketing." If you must, absolutely must, ask for an email address, point them to a privacy policy in which you assure them that you won't use the email address for anything else.

Popup windows. Popup windows really annoy visitors, many of whom will just leave. Never force anything on people. Surfers don't appreciate it. On the web, users should be in control of what they view and when they view it.

Chat rooms. You can find many free scripts for installing chat rooms. Don't bother. Unless you have hundreds of visitors per hour, chances are the chat room is empty. Who wants to hang out in an empty room? There are websites where a chat room serves a practical purpose--large community sites, customer service, etc.--but it's doubtful that any of them are church sites.

Guestbooks. These are worthless. Except to spammers. Spammers love using guestbooks to send pornographic messages.

The weather. Weather.com will give you html code, so you can embed the current weather for your area code. It's a nice marketing tool for Weather.com, a way to bring traffic to their site. It doesn't do anything meaningful for your visitors.

Other embedded code. This doesn't mean that all embedded code from other sites is useless. A Google search box is good (though perhaps not valuable for a small church site). And embedding a map, whether from Google or Mapquest or Yahoo!, is always a good thing.