After 10 years of designing web sites, I’ve definitely changed the way I evaluate a website. Being a member of various open source design sites such as opendesigns.org, OpenWebDesign.org, and OSWD, I’ve gotten to know a whole slew of talented designers and together we are creating designs which focus on web standards, accessibility, and simple beauty.

A good website doesn’t need a slew of animation or graphics to get it’s point across. A good website doesn’t have to be fancy at all, in fact.

People visit web sites for specific purposes. If your web site fulfills that purpose and the visitor buys from you or they post comments on your blog, etc..that means you’re doing something right. So if your site has good content with a nice-looking design that’s easy to navigate, you’ve got a good website and your job is to keep tweaking it and promoting it to reach as many visitors as possible in your target market.

What is bad to me may seem alright to someone else so keep that in mind. A bad site has more ads than content, has pop-ups (why would you consider putting pop-ups on your site when so many people use pop-up blockers?), opens multiple browser windows, is unreadable (dark text on dark background), forces you to use one specific browser, is slow-loading, or crashes your browser.

If I’m really interested in a site often I’ll look at it’s source code. With HTML Tidy, I can see right away what coding errors and warnings are on a page and whether the design adheres to current web standards. I will overlook these flaws if the site’s content is good. Or if a specific need I have is fulfilled. Otherwise, I’m out of there and on to the next site, never to return again.

Some websites I’ve seen have good content, but they’re really ugly.
Nothing’s uglier to me than a site that has clashing colors. With all the online color scheme generators that are available, it’s really easy to come up with a harmonious color palette for your site.

If you’re expecting me to list sites here that I consider good, bad and ugly, I hate to disappoint you. I don’t want to bash anyone, because that’s really counter-productive and also it’s been done before on sites such as webpagesthatsuck.com.
In the greater scheme of things, does it really matter what I think?

Please your visitors, please yourself, and hire a professional web designer to create your site or use a good web template.