PiticStyle

As a web designer, you should design your websites to give your visitors the greatest ease of use, the best impression and most important of all a welcoming experience. It doesn’t matter if you had the greatest product in the whole world — if your website is poorly done you won’t be able to sell even one copy of it because visitors will be driven off your website by the lousy design.

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

Hence, I have highlighted some features of the worst web designs I’ve come across. Hopefully, 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 serious action!

1) Background music

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, a CD or anything related to music, I would really advise you to stay away from putting looping background music onto your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine if you ran a big site with hundreds of pages and everytime a visitor browses to another page on your site, the background music starts playing again. If I were your visitor, I’d just turn off my speakers or leave your site. Moreover, 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.
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vs

XHTML 1.0 is a reformulation of HTML 4.0. What this really means is that learning XHTML is basically the same as learning HTML. The main difference is a few simple rules - as XHTML is more strict than standard HTML.

[1] Stricter adherence to the HTML specification
Many browsers are very lax in how they interpret HTML. This leads to incongruities in how the pages are displayed, and XHTML doesn’t allow that. The best way to correct this is to use an XHTML validator such as HTML Tidy.

[2] Write well formed documents
What this generally means is avoiding overlapping elements. The following nested code is acceptable: <p>Paragraph <em>emphasized</em></p> because the <em> tag is opened and closed within the <p> tag. However, this is not allowed: <p>Paragraph <em>emphasized</p></em> because the <em> tag overlaps the <p> tag.
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