These gimmicks, along with animated graphics, are extremely distracting, especially to eyes of visitors who are much more interested in what owner of web site has to say.

SUMMING UP: Well, this series of articles deals with some of my personal prejudices. However, things that irritate me might not be important to someone else, and you don't have to take notice of them if you don't want to. Nevertheless, most of these faults ARE considered by genuine professional web designers to be serious ones. While some people insist a web page is nothing like a printed page, and web designers are therefore free to break all rules of good page layout and design, fact remains that if it looks ugly on paper it looks just as ugly on a monitor. Do you really fancy reading a book or newspaper with black pages and white, blue or bright green print, for instance? Well, then, why would anyone want to read something like this on a monitor? However, I'm amazed at number of web site creators who expect me to do just this!

Here, it's art and science of web development that's fun part. Juggling a variety of e-commerce vendors for different e-commerce needs (or performing in-house technical work of commerce-enabling a client site) can be infinitely less rewarding than primary web design/development.

Unfortunately, most clients don't spend a lot time reviewing nuances of source code - that weird cipher rippling beneath surface of their web pages. Instead, business functionality is their primary goal - and online credit card authorization may supplant web artistry on your clients' list of priorities. And rightly so - it's their business at stake.

So on web developer's plate, you have responsibility of translating a client's vision into a web-based reality, of mobilizing underlying code. In many cases, you also have additional task of e-commerce enabling site - integrating e-commerce systems and coordinating various service providers. Synchronizing these latter aspects of development can be frustrating, regardless of whether you outsource or perform tasks in-house.

Here, you may be required to organize secure server hosting, integrate an automated payment processing system and secure order page, incorporate catalog and shopping cart functionality, and in some cases you may even have to help swing a card-not-present merchant account so your client can accept credit cards on Internet. There's a lot of detail work to manage.