The face of most businesses today isn’t the CEO or the founder or a spokesperson; it’s the company Web site. Given that, one would think that businesses would spend a lot of time and effort putting their best face forward, but that often isn’t the case. Many company Web sites, and the Web applications offered to customers, are riddled with bugs, flaws and outright errors that can make a top-flight business look like a cheap amateur. Here, I’ve compiled a list of the worst mistakes being made by Web developers today. Don’t let this happen to you.

Too Many Click
This is great that someone is at your site, and he’s ready to make a purchase. Here he goes: One click, two clicks, three clicks and just one more! And he’s gone. Maybe if he could have gotten to where he wanted to go right away, you would have made a sale.

Hide Behind Graphics
It’s great that new Web technologies make it possible to add lots of cool new navigation and interaction techniques. But don’t hide access to important features and content behind an unintuitive graphic or icon

Overly Graphics Intensive
Filling your site with Web content that contains massive image files and graphics will put off everyone but those with the fastest possible Internet connections.

Just Plain HTML Link
Scripting languages make it possible to do lots of cool things in Web design. But don’t use it when an HTML link will work just fine and more reliably.

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Software developer Thinkfree has launched a free online office package. The ThinkFree Online software includes a word processor,spreadsheet and a presentation program. Each is compatible with its Microsoft Office equivalent, but with no cost to access. Because it uses Java,it is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers.

Registration and basic use is free,but accessing some features work on a points system.All new users receive 100 points on registration, and extra points can either be bought or earned by getting other users to sign up. Points can be spent on clip art or templates,to remove banner ads or to increase the 1Gb of storage space included at registration.An offline version is available for £35.

www.thinkfree.com

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Clipmarks
A must for any Web freak. Available for IE, Firefox, and Flock, this browser plugin lets you grab snippets from any Web page and save them to your own private library (or serve them up to the Net at large, Web 2.0–style). You can easily e-mail or print your captures, and with the latest version you can even clip videos from YouTube and post them straight to your blog.

Download free from www.clipmarks.com

Myaboo
Just need a way of sharing Web links from your browser? And you wouldn’t be caught dead using something called del.icio.us? This free Firefox extension fits the bill. You can freely swap URLs with friends, family, and, yes, the general public. There’s also quick access to the major Web services and a built-in search box that instantly queries everything from Google to IMDb.
Get it free from www.myaboo.com

Send Page By Email
This clever Firefox add-on (with the less-than-clever name) lets you instantly capture images of Web pages and share them via e-mail. Rather than sharing links, you share screen shots. It’s the perfect way to grab and send a page that’s sure to change in the next few minutes. It’s even better if
you’ve got lazy friends. You can send them all the latest Web info, and they never have to click through.
Get free from addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2343

Auto Copy
Chances are, if you select some text on a Web page, you’re going to copy it to the Windows Clipboard. Microsoft hasn’t figured this out, but developer Michael Lidman has. Compatible with Mozilla’s Firefox browser, his Auto Copy add-on automatically copies selected text, so there’s no need to mess with the Edit menu or additional keystrokes. To paste, simply press a mouse button. Or you can do it the old-fashioned, convoluted way. Your choice.

Download free from addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/229

AllPeers
Fed up with e-mail attachments? With this Firefox extension, swapping massive multimedia files is actually easy. Click on the AllPeers icon and up pops a list of files sent by friends, family, and colleagues, right there inside your browser. Then, with another click, you can download each one to your hard drive. To share your own files, simply drag them onto a friend’s name and off they go. (Should someone tell the major record labels?)
Download free from www.allpeers.com

Forecastfox
If you’re like most hard-core Web surfers, you don’t even know what time of day it is, let alone what the weather’s like outside. Fortunately for you, Windows has a little clock down in the lower right-hand corner and Mozdev.org gives you Fore-castfox. This nifty add-on grabs weather info from AccuWeather.com and displays it right there on your browser toolbar. You can adjust the number of days being forecast, and if you mouse-click on a particular day, up pops a new window with all sorts of additional weather info.
Download free from forecastfox.mozdev.org

Small business owners and their sales teams can get the structure they need for a successful sales process with Prophet 4.0 Professional, the software that integrates directly into Microsoft Outlook. This intuitive product provides features such as advanced filtering of opportunities, sharing of task information among team members, centralized reporting, an off-line mode for mobile users, and automated scheduling for e-mail, tasks, and appointments.

The simple automation provided for common sales tasks was what grabbed me the most. It lets you, for example, set up an e-mail to be sent to all your contacts, or automatically schedule a follow-on activity. Companies that want to customize sales processes and provide selective access to contacts and opportunities, though, should look to Prophet Enterprise. Prophet Professional allows only rudimentary contact sharing, so organizations with sales people who collaborate will want to purchase Prophet Server and, to avoid synchronization issues, use it with Microsoft Exchange Server. Single users who don’t want automated follow-ups or a centralized server will find the $99.95 Prophet Personal more cost-effective.

Prophet’s customization capabilities are weak, and the Group Email Wizard is rather rudimentary. I also encountered some minor UI issues. Still, the product offers the same basic functionality as ACT! and Goldmine, but in an easier-to-use package for existing Microsoft Outlook users.

Designers now have a tool that lets users create modern CSS and XML-based Web pages without fuss and produces efficient, universally compatible code with minimal effort. Nothing else matches Microsoft Expression Web’s standards based approach or so easily lets you build Web pages that display data from XML files.

At first glance, the software looks like the late, lamented Front Page 2003. It uses a similar menu structure and choice of relatively WYSIWYG views: design, pure-code, and code on top with the visual design below. FrontPage features that create standards-based code for any browser and Web server still work. New task panes and toolbars let you build and edit CSS styles and give point-and-click control over XML data sources.

The master page helps you easily create a consistent site. Fashioning dynamic data views requires almost no effort, and if you know CSS basics, a simple right-click on an element lets you control formatting of a data view. You won’t yet find the range of add-ins available for Adobe Dreamweaver, though.

Microsoft Expression Web lacks Secure FTP file-transfer support for publishing sites to the Web, but that’s a relatively minor complaint about an otherwise elegant and efficient application. I strongly recommend it to anyone building Web pages. That said, stay tuned for my review of Dreamweaver’s CS3 edition.