Above all, if you use frames, make sure that if a user clicks on a link that leaves your immediate site, the frames will not follow. It can be very frustrating to become stuck in another site's frames. These should be used only as a temporary measure when the page really is under construction. In other words, these images and text should not exist for longer than a week. Counters should not be used.
Counters tend to take a long time to load especially when they are accessed from remote sites.
This often leads to a user waiting a long time, not for the page to load but for the counter to load. In the meantime they may well give up and move on. Make the text bigger, change the color or change the font, but don't make the text blink. Don't use the script that allows text to scroll across the status bar as this defeats the purpose of this bar. Remember, not everyone uses Netscape.