For browsing the Internet, do you use Firefox? (If not, why not?) If you do, here is a simple way of checking for last-century design practices.
Pick a page from the site you want to check. Click on the View menu, then select Page Style > No Style. A modern professional site will immediately transform itself into a vertical list of design elements, without styling or layout.
You can try it on this site, this page, right now. I designed the local bits of this, but the overall look and layout is from WordPress—a twenty-first century enterprise if there ever was one.
This site will change, in obvious ways. If the site you pick stays much the same, then it has been designed by people stuck in the twentieth century, using toy tools made for amateurs and cowboys. Don’t let them anywhere near your money.
There is probably a way of carrying out this check using Internet Explorer 7. But since Microsoft invaded my copy with Spanish—see my post of the 19th of May this year—I can’t find special options like this.
