I know it sounds awkward, but resemblance to the 1990s is still around. You may be puzzled, now what is this man talking about? I’m talking about individuals, small business, and even corporate Fortune 500 companies still designing websites in not yesterdays standards, but standards from many days ago. Far too often, individuals make websites into art projects, when in reality they are there to serve a purpose and that is to provide people with information in an appealing manner.

Cascading Style sheets (CSS) - Sound familiar? I sure hope so. Cascading style sheets paired with xHTML represent the present and future of web development. Without them, how would you expect to provide successful websites both from an aesthetic standpoint and marketing standpoint; the answer is you could not.

The craze of meta tags - Another outdated "idea" used back in the early days of the web design (pre-2000). People believe that adding over 70 words in their <meta name="description"> meta tag is going to do them quite a lot. People who are knowledgeable enough about SEO know that this does nothing but get you banned from the search engines.

Site topic - For some odd reason, people who get an idea for a website nine times out of ten simply are trying to compete with established websites with similar topics. For instance, how many web hosting companies do you know? How many web design forums do you know of? Ever tried email account providers? If you’ve been on the net for even a few years you’ve probably come past only a few dozen of each topic’s website, most often this is just a small slice of the pie of how many websites there are for a given topic. So what makes your website unique? Even if your site deals with web hosting for example, it could be about how different web hosting businesses are run instead of actually selling hosting; in the latter case the amount of websites for that topic would be massive.

These are just a few problems individuals run into when initially creating a website. When they realize their problems, they typically have already spent many hours either developing the website or paying someone to do it; most often the wrong way. Good luck with your future websites!

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This article originally appeared on author Joseph Dickinson's site. Reprinted with permission.

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