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When the internet first became popular years ago, it was o.k. to get your neighbor's kid to design a website for you. Remember that? A page with a bunch of square pictures and fonts of different sizes and colors telling about yourself or your business. WOW! We thought that was something!

While that may have been acceptable 15 years ago, today you would be the laughingstock of the community. Below we list three easy ways to spot a bad website, or 3 good signs of a bad website. This list will help you avoid common mistakes make by beginning web designers.

Here are 3 things you need to check when designing your website:

1.) Consistency-A website should be consistent in design throughout all pages. You should not have a picture of palm trees as the background for one page and pictures of Egyptian pyramids on the next. Your website should flow seamlessly like a software program, not like a composite of 20 different sites piled on top of one another. Your font style and size should be the same on every page. It is best to use a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) to control your font sizes. However if you are not sure how to use one, just do your best to make sure that each page follows the same design standards.

2.) Components- Beware of using "free webmaster tools" for your guestbook, forum, or other site components. Such services often steal your hits, rob your traffic, and lower your Pagerank in the search engines. They do this because your visitors must leave your site to sign your guestbook, etc. When your pages are indexed by the search engines, they will not be listed with your domain. Not to mention the fact that they're usually ugly. With todays easy to use Content Management Systems, it is simple to download and install these components on your site. This not only keeps your visitors on your site, but it also helps you follow rule #1.

3.) Compatibility- Not everyone uses the same web browser. Just because your site looks good on your computer does not mean it looks good on others. Download Firefox, Netscape and a few other browsers. See how your site looks on them. Then set your monitor to a different resolution and try again. Make sure that you are not losing possible clients because your website looks strange in their browser.

If you are going to put forth the effort to own a website, you might as well make it look professional. Avoiding these three common mistakes in web design is a good start.