I usually devote very little time, but i know i should deal with that more seriously. Concerning usability i use myself as measure, but i can be hardly named general webuser. It is lucky that i have a sister and a girlfriend, who criticize the final products uninvitedly

I think your sister and girlfriend are giving you excellent critics of you work for free, you should thank them
I like you usually use myself as the test but like you pointed out, you and I are advanced internet users so we are not good test case but our experience will also help us see faults less experienced people can see but I think we should all use at least five users of mix abilities to test our designs for usability, each person will see different faults which in the end makes out application or web design more user friendly.

Yes Temi, you are right I should thank them. You know they are very funny girl and use to play jokes on my sites. They said that I should insert audio files to help visitors find the menu, and so on..

I bet that joke about installing audio files makes you design better navigation system for your sites

Considering the difficulties in layout(differences in IE and Good Browsers), I'd say that approximately 90% of my design time goes into finding ways to make a design work in all of the major browsers. In a perfect world, visual aesthetics and usability should take up about 90%, and the coding should only take up 10%.

But I voted less than 50%. I think it's important to get other opinions about a sites usability, and even though we are sometimes blind to our own workings, other webmasters offer great objective advice that I take quite seriously, especially when it comes to usability. I think it would be nice to be able to get feedback from normal users as well, it would give you a great advantage in the design phase to have that kind of feedback.