It's not surprising that there are still plenty of problems with Web sites today. It was only four or five years ago that Web pages even became common. In those days, it seemed as if people thought that their Web sites would attract traffic simply because they existed - and, maybe, in some cases that approach worked back then. But they were generally ugly and, more importantly, they were really hard to use. Today, we're in an age where professional Web designers have learned from their mistakes.
Good sites tend to be lean and fast, with a premium on function over flash.
Design mistakes aren't always painfully obvious. But in other cases, it can have a real impact on how a page functions. And if there is one thing we've learned over the past few years, it's that little things can make a big difference in how a Web page works. See Figure 1. Each project starts, of course, with the realization that we have a product or service that merits its own page, section, or UI element on our site.