Fundamental to good website design is solid graphic design. Early on in the internet age, it was acceptable to have a website with good content and amateurish design. Being online was so novel in and of itself that all the hallmarks of bad design, including crowded images, hard to read text, gaudy backgrounds, and spinning globes were just part of the ticket. It didn’t matter if the same person who did your programming and wrote the text did the design.

Now the internet has grown up, and people expect to see a professional appearance. If they go to your website and see bad layout, poor quality images, crowded and overlapping content, or mismatched fonts, they will look down on your organization. In fact, a first impression on the internet is even harder to overcome. Every website is never more than one mouse-click from being displaced, and there is no way to chase your visitor down and convince him to see past the bad design.