You've no doubt read many times that your website needs to be 'professional' but what does this mean, exactly?

Do It Yourself website builders sound inviting, but often end up pretty much as a disaster, or at best not very good for driving revenue.

What are the tell-tale signs of a site that has been put together by someone that is still learning, doing it on the cheap or who simply doesn't know what they are doing?

1. Just Plain ugliness.

Fast moving neon rainbows. Yellow text on white backgrounds. And comic sans. Never use Comic Sans as a font choice. It always looks cheap.

Contrarily people with a few graphical skills can put together a site that looks pretty - but still has no content that would translate site visitors into customers.

Clip art for decoration. Low quality images and scrolling marques.  Poor contrast beteen font colour and the background.

Patterned page backgrounds  are one of the biggest contributors to website awfullness.  If the content area has a plain background behind it then it can be ok and even look good.  But  no one should have to try and read text over a tiled image of your cat.

2. Broken Layout

What do mean you didn't test how it looked in all browsers? If you don't even know what this means and why you have to do it you could be in trouble.

A layout is broken if elements appear overlapping or otherwise out of place.

3. All bling and no substance

Flashing banners, scrolling text, lots of animated gifs. Use of Flash is declining. It put up a good fight but the end of websites built in Flash is inevitable as we move to HTML5.

Even pretty static images won't solve a website that is as empty of value as a plastic bag.

4. Splash/intro pages

These went out in the last decade. For a reason. They add no value and interrupt the users experience.

5. Very long load times

For either pages or images – you know the kind, the ones that seem to prefer to 'reveal' themselves slowly. Painfully.

6. Distorted images

Often the result of trying to scale an 100X100 pixel image into an 960 x 200 space. In fairness this can happen when even the most professionally designed and built website is handed over to someone who isn't qualified to manage it.

7. Multiple font styles and colours

Several is Ok. Ten is not. Old fashioned cursive and serif fonts should only be used if appropriate to your brand (like, you sell Antiques)

Not limited to the DIY-er but sins none the less

1. Lorem Ipsom holder content
2. Coming Soon or deserted pages (ones that have a sentence, and that's it)
3. Outdated content – if your news section hasn't been updated for a year, what does that say about your business?

Other signs you've taken short-cuts

1. No Content Management System unless it's a microsite, landing page or just temporary
2. No Analytics – you can't manage what you can't measure
3. Not W3C compliant – bad code is bad code
4. Missing meta data – especially missing title tags means Google probably can't see the site