Hippocrates, the father of medicine, advised physicians, "first, do no harm" when treating patients.

Web designers would do well to heed that mantra.

Far too often a web designer will add page elements that distract, confuse or frustrate potential customers - and this can cause visitors to head for the exits.

This is especially true on order pages.

Any element, especially images and clickable links, added to an order page has the potential to distract the customer, and cause him or her to forget the reason they visited the order page in the first place.

On order pages, your goal should be to help the customer stay focused on the task at hand - and one way to do this is to remove the clutter from the page.

No dancing monkeys, no distracting images, no outbound links.

All part of your basic "do no harm" web design strategy.