Business-focused custom software

This week I started maintaining a web application written by someone else. The code itself isn't bad; it isn't how I would organize it, but that's not particularly surprising.

But the user interface, and in particular the validation, is pretty old-school. For example, for fields like dollar amounts that should only allow numeric values, you can type whatever characters you like, and then it provides an error after a postback to the server. Another example: when I left a password field blank, I got two errors instead of one - one for the missing password, and one because the password was invalid. Nothing that is horrible, exactly, just not as clean as it could be.

It may be that for this application, little details like these will not affect usage. But for some applications, small user interface problems can quickly add up to a situation where users will walk away from your application. And that can cost your business money. So figuratively "slap some paint" on your user interface. Paying attention to those details so that your application looks clean and professional can make a big difference.