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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.

2) Extra large/small text size

As I said, there is more to web design than purely graphics — user accessibility is one big part of it too! You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes. No matter how good the content of your website or your sales copy is, if it’s illegible you won’t be selling anything!

3) Popup windows

Popup windows are so blatantly used to display advertisements that in my mind, 90% of popup windows are not worth my attention so I just close them on instinct everytime each one manages to pass through my popup blocker (yes, I do have one like many users out there!) and, well, pops up on my screen. Imagine if you had a very important message to convey and you put it in a popup window that gets killed most of the time it appears on a visitor’s screen. Your website loses its function immediately!

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 minor mistakes stop your site from functioning optimally!

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If you have even a remote interest in earning money on the internet, you have probably come across those pay per click programs that promise fabulous amounts of money just by clicking on ads and completing free offers. Are these things for real? Let’s take a look at exactly how they work and why you should avoid them.

The reality is that these pay per click websites are earning quite a bit of money off of their users. Sure, they might pay you a sum of money for doing the offers on their site, but rest assured that they are earning far more than you are! Between paid ads and the payment they receive for sending you to collect all those special offers, the pay per click sites are raking it in! And they have even more techniques to make money off of their unsuspecting users.

For example, have you ever read the Terms and Conditions contract that is on the website of one of these pay per click programs? If not, you should. You are almost guaranteed to find that they are not protecting you against anything. Your private information will become public knowledge and not only that, but possibly sold for yet more profit by the pay per click company or its affiliates!

While many pay per click sites really do pay up, they often have a payout limit that takes forever to reach so many people give up before getting to their goal of $50 or whatever the amount is and the company never needs to actually pay up. And when you do reach the payout level, there are far too many pay per click sites that actually refuse to pay!

That is the downside of the actual pay per click company, but what about the offers that you are completing? There are assorted different offers that you can fill out. Anything from simply filling out a form with your email address and name to ordering a product or a quote that you pay for and are then reimbursed for (on top of which you receive a bonus from the pay per click company).

If you fill out a form on a pay per click site, you are probably signing up for an email newsletter from the company that is paying. These are the lowest paying pay per click actions, ranging from fifty cents to a dollar. You are guaranteed to receive heaps of ads and junk mail to your inbox after signing up for one of these offers, and just deleting them all takes so much time that the piddly sum isn’t worth it!

As for the major pay per click offers where you sign up for a free trial period or a quote or other item that requires you to enter your credit card, stay far, far away. Too many people have been cheated out of their money by these companies when they were unable to cancel their membership when the trial period came up. These sites are usually designed so that you can’t quit even if you want to and they just keep charging your credit card, month after month.

Pay per click programs sound great, but they are often a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is better to look for a real online job rather than waste your time with these programs.

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