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Amateurish websites can be spotted from a mile away. Lousy web layouts that are hard to navigate, frames that clog instead of help, and tiled backgrounds that add a kindergarten style look to it all. The problem with sites on the Internet today is that they employ concepts that don't have to be employed. It is thrown in there on a clueless webmaster's whim and impulse without asking the question "what can this animation that takes 3 minutes to download do for me besides annoy a first-time visitor?"
A trademark of poor quality websites are the concepts that come with a personal home page. You've seen it - a plain photo of the author on the top right hand corner with "Welcome to My Web Page" highlighted in centred, bolded text under it. What about the paragraph of text that proceeds: "Hello, Welcome to my site. My name is Michael Smith and welcome to my webpage. Some of my favourite pastimes include swimming, bowling, and annoying website visitors with drivel."
The main point is that unless you are some kind of world-renowned celebrity, into professional sports or a former top ranked Italian army official, no one really cares about your life's details. If nobody cares, why devote an entire webpage to it? Another trademark of the drab personal homepage is the "My Favourite Bookmarks" section with a jumbled assortment of links to other pages that contribute nothing to the overall scheme of things.
Web designers tend to go all-out when they really don't have to. Junior designers who've just graduated from media school are the usual culprits. With a fresh, new certificate, they think they have the right to unleash their Macromedia software and Flash to produce some shinny and slick albeit most worthless sites on the Internet.
There was once a high profile British band that launched a new bands site last year. Although the site was lush with pretty graphics, its navigation bars were atrocious - zipping past the screen so fast a mouse couldn't nail it down. Bottom line: it may look pretty, but if it is impossible to navigate, no one will care in the end.
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