What makes a good site? This is what every web designer is trying to answer. Get to know the basic tenants of a site that works and your designs will improve tremendously. But, what about identifying bad sites?

A bad site is very easy to spot. Most visitors can - and will - tell when a site is not up to their quality standards. A visitor's opinion of a site will vary depending on what the site is about but, in general, there are certain traits that give a bad site away quickly.

Legibility One of the most common complaints is related to the font size. Many web designers tend to use frustratingly small text that becomes tiring very fast. Browsers allow the user to increase the overall size of text, but a really bad site will make sure the fonts and other elements use fixed units, so that visitors are forced to be uncomfortable or break the layout.

Contrast is an important second. Noisy backgrounds and a poor choice of colors will make for a painful read, but if mixed with unnecessarily small fonts a new level of illegibility can be achieved; sometimes being entirely unreadable for visitors with disabilities.

Navigation The easiest way to frustrate a visitor is to mess with the navigation. For example, many sites make sure the links to other pages are hidden inside a weird animation based on some external plugin such as Flash or Java, the weirder the better; although many visitors manage to get away unharmed because they have such plugins disabled.

Some web designers go the extra mile to make sure the animation is not only painfully unnecessary but also ridiculously large in KBs, so that modem and crowded-network users have to wait for the file to load at least a minute or two before they can visit another page. Brilliant!

But the prize has to go for those that make the extra effort of adding sound to each mouse hover. And don't forget the Javascript mouse-tracer demanding attention every time the cursor is moved! If all these elements are put together carefully, one could even crash an older computer with all the un-optimized processing going on at the same time.

Valid code A good designer knows the importance of creating valid code, but a truly bad site takes advantage of the problems caused by invalid code and uses them to annoy the visitor. Non-compliant code comes more often in the form of a site developed with a "site generator," or pieced together from "cool" scripts such as the menus discussed above.

The next step is to test the design in only one of the browsers available to the average user. The worst sites go the extra mile by making sure the elements on the page are set using fixed units, so that the site will look half-way decent in only one of the increasingly growing amount of screen sizes that visitors use today.

By following these steps you can also be almost certain that the site will not work on the new wave of alternative browsers such as those for PDAs, cellphones and screen-readers, nor will it be indexed properly by automated spiders such as those from search engines and directories.

Pop-ups Don't forget the pop-ups! Extensive research has proven beyond any possible doubt that pop-ups are by far the most annoying thing one can encounter while browsing. No bad site is complete without a few pop-ups here and there, especially if the advertisement in such pop-ups is completely unrelated to the content of the site; but even more if it is blinking, offering a prize for "hitting" something and, of course, requires an external plugin such as Flash that hogs up the resources.

As a regular at www.netbulge.com I see plenty of people trying hard to come up with good sites, but I also encounter plenty of people that seem to be doing extensive research in the artistry of bad design. I'm sure this article will aid both groups, or at least help establish the difference between them.

About the author:

Esopo is the site-admin at www.netbulge.com , a place devoted to providing web developers with tips, tricks and resources to stay current with web technologies.