When I’m talking about a “good design,” I’m not just talking about a good graphic design. A web design professional will be able to point out that there are many components that contribute to a good web design – design of accessibility, or interface design, design of the user experience and, of course, the simplest, which is graphic design .

Therefore, I have highlighted some of the worst features of the web designs I’ve found. Fortunately, you can compare that information with its own website as a checklist and if anything on your site meets the criteria, you should know that it’s time to take serious action!

1) Background Music

Unless you are running a site that promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting the background music loop in place. It might sound pleasant to you first, but imagine if you run a great site with hundreds of pages and every time a user navigates to another page on your site, background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, just add to the load when visitors see your site – users of dial-up connections will have to wait longer just to see your site, as it is meant to be seen.

2) Extra large / small text size

As I said, there are more web design than purely graphics – user accessibility is a big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to allow visitors to read without straining your eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy, that is, if you are not illegible sell anything!

3) windows pop

Pop-ups are so blatantly used to display ads that in my mind, 90% of pop-ups are not worth my attention so I just shut down on instinct every time that each manages to get through my pop-blocker -ups (yes, I do have a like many users out there!) and, thus, appears on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and put in a popup window that killed most often appears on a screen visitors. His website loses its function immediately!

To conclude this article, let me remind you that as webmaster of his job is to make sure that your site does what he has to do effectively. Do not let some minor mistakes stop your site works best!

Make sure you have clear instructions on the navigation of your site. The navigation menu should be simple and concise so that visitors know how to navigate your website without confusion.

Reduce the number of images on its website. They make your site load very slowly and more often than not are quite unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, be sure to optimize using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.

Keep your paragraphs of text a reasonable length. If a paragraph is too long, you must divide into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too large will deter visitors from reading your content.

Make sure your website complies with Web standards in www.w3.org and make sure they are cross-browser compatible. If your site looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, will lose out on a lot of potential visitors.

Avoid using scripting languages on your site unless absolutely necessary. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on its website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. In addition, the scripts are not supported by all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information because of that.

Using CSS to style your page content because it saved a lot of work by styling all elements on its Web site at once.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You are organized, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related to your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “Salesperson shabbily dressed” anology, and you will get my point.