Okay - it's a rant. Get over it.

Avoid these things in websites:

• Frames - this is soooo 1990's. It's bad for search engines, screen readers and a whole bunch of other stuff. They're not necessary, so avoid them.
  
  
• 100% graphic-only websites - You know what - you can use these if you don't give a rat's @ss about search engine optimization or ease of updating or people with visual difficulties. You can't increase the font size. You have to call your graphic designer / web developer to make the simplest change and search engines can only read TEXT - not pictures.
  
  
• Webpages with no titles - What's the title? According to what search engines look at, it's the information contained between the <title> and </title> tag in the code. Where YOU, the human being experiencing the site see the title is RIGHT AT THE TOP OF YOUR SCREEN - above the "window" that displays the website - above the menu options in your browser software - right at the tippy-top of the page. Search engines love them. People often don't notice them on your site, but considering the title of the page is what's displayed in search engine results (along with your description meta tag contents), you'd better have one for the people too. Oh yeah, they're also a teeny-tiny bit important for search engine optimization as well. (Did the sarcasm come across there? It should have...)

In the past two days, I have encountered websites committing all these sins. Granted, some of them were DIY websites. That's acceptable. The other sites were done by people who get paid to design websites. I'm speechless when trying to think what I can say about those folks.

I will admit it is possible that the web developer did what the client WANTED them to do.

However, I also know that knowledge of the issues surrounding website development and internet marketing is low in the non-internet business world.

Therefore, doing what the client WANTS is not always in their best interest unless they have been informed about the pros and cons of doing it "their way".

If you're going to get a website, get informed - either by doing your own research and knowing what questions to ask or by meeting with more than one or two web designers so you can get an idea how much they know about the MARKETING side of the internet.

Having a beautiful website that is invisible in the search engines is an option if there are compensatory strategies in place to drive traffic to it, but when you could have both, why would you settle for less?

The enemy of "great" is "good". Ask yourself what could be done to make your online presence GREAT! More importantly, ask your web developer the right questions to see if THEY have a clue.