Most of the time, you can easily see the school of though a web designer leans towards in their web design. Web designer from a graphic design background tends to be high in visual element of the website, design eye catching websites with very little use of text, there are some website that are actually completely made from graphic without a single text a spider can read.
There other design who go in the opposite direction, loads of text with very little graphics. From search engine optimisation view point, this is actually great but from usability point of view, its almost as bad as the site design entirely with graphics.  The best sites are somewhere in between the two methods.

One mistake some designer make is that the lose focus of the purpose or a website, a website that is not and information site basically want to sell something to you, a designer should get to the point without too much irrelevant information.  One case in point is a website recently reviewed by Temi.ro , the site is and adult dating site, the previous version of the site (see image 1)

Very Naughty old version

was quite heavy on text, does not place information about the services and call to action link that will help visitors make up their mind quickly in a prominent place. The result was that the site gets a lot of visitors but also loses most of the.

The site was recently redesigned with help from Temi.ro. (see image 2). It was emphasised to the designer that importance of presenting information and arranging functions and call to action links or button in a way that makes the maximum use of the screen space without the need for users to scroll before accessing required information.
The new design was also requested to keep all the text from the old site and use H tags instead of bold tag for paragraph headlines. The final result of the new design was and eye catching website with straight forward link functions and call to action links. As at the time of writing this post, the site owner has recorded 10% drop in bounce rate.