To start off, one of the usual mistakes that an over enthusiastic new designer is bound to make is, to go directly for an eye catching and great looking background. But the greatest advice anybody can give a designer for an attractive background, is to make it plain white. That’s right; a plain white background allows the user to feel more relaxed and at-home. It is also less confusing for him and gives him an interest to explore the site more thoroughly. The maximum that can be done to make the page more interesting is to substitute white with black. Of course, there can be other colour schemes which may be required regarding a particular theme concerning the website, therefore the colour choices must be made accordingly. For a children’s site or a fun gaming site, bright colours can always be used, but on the other hand, for didactic or business related sites, subdued and natural colours must be resorted to. Colours almost always create the first setting impression for the audience. It is said that a user makes his first impression about the site, within nine seconds of visiting it. Therefore capturing the target audience’s needs and interests in a matter of seconds using the appearance of the site, must be first and foremost in the priority list of the designer, not the display of his artistic skills.

Busy graphics in general must be avoided. Bright graphics or even very complicated graphics tend to confuse the user and drift his attention away from the main purpose of his visit.

In the beginning days of web designing, designers stuck to the good old linear look for their page. This meant straight lines of images, text body, headings etc. These made the pages extremely long. Users often begin to get tired of scrolling down a page for too long. Actually it wasn’t the fault of the designers, but that they had no other choice. It is very recently hat html’s new version allows designers to use the side by side table format of representation. The table format must thus be used by a designer to the full extent. Long web pages can just evoke a snooze fest. Tables or a number of columns in the same page lead to easier reading, and give much more information in one go. This pleases the users much more than long scrolls down.

Another sure sign of an amateur’s webpage is if the page is one big clutter; banners for this, icons for that, bubbles and blurbs which take up too much space in the webpage. It must be kept in mind that the more graphics are used and the more extra features a designer uses for what he thinks will make the webpage more attractive, only adds to the loading time of the page for the user. This may not go down well with the audience, and they just might go away to an easier site to load. Of course, links are very important, to other business associates or little search engines or other related sites. But these must be placed properly throughout the page and not just strewed randomly at the bottom of the page.

An amateur’s task is to make himself look bored with the profession, not as excited as a bubbly teenager with a gadget.