As a web designer, you have to create your websites to give your visitors the utmost ease of use, the best feeling and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn't matter if you had the greatest merchandise in the whole world, if your website is badly done you won't be able to sell even one copy of it as visitors will be driven off your website by your lousy web design and development.

When I'm discussing a "good design", I'm not just talking about a good graphical design. A professional small business web design will be able to point out that there are many mechanisms which are put in place in order to create a good and effective website design -- accessibility web design, interface or layout web design, user experience design and of course the most clear-cut, which is graphic design.

Consequently, I have highlighted some characteristics of the worst web designs I've come across. with any luck, you will be able to compare that against your own site as a checklist and if anything on your site fits the criteria, you should know it's high time to take severe action!

Small Business Web Design & Development Number 1 - Background music Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything associated with music, I would in actuality strongly advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound enjoyable to you at first, but envisage if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and every time a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing another time. If I were your visitor, I'd just turn off my speakers or leave your site. furthermore, they just add to the visitors burden when viewing your site -- users on dial up connections will have to wait longer just to view your site as it is meant to be viewed.

Small Business Web Design & Development Number 2 - Extra large/small text size As I said, there is more to web design and development than purely graphics -- user accessibility is one huge part of it too! You have to design the text on your site to be readable and reasonably sized to allow your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how first-rate the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it's hard to decipher you won't be selling anything!

Small Business Web Design & Development Number 3 - Popup windows Popup windows are so unashamedly used to flaunt advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my consideration so I just close them on instinct every time each one manages to pass through my popup blocker and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had an extremely vital message to put across and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor's pc screen. Your website loses its purpose straight away!

In concluding this article, let me remind you that as a webmaster your job is to make sure your website does what it's meant to do effectively. Don't let some inconsequential errors stop your site from functioning optimally!