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| Designs evolve from a keen understanding of your audience, your aims and the current digital standards. What you really need should be given very careful consideration before you start production. The suggestions below can help. |
| First, keep it simple. Forget about avant-garde, cool, bleeding-edge, ultra-hip, elitist technologies altogether. Don't torture your visitors by requiring plug-ins, pop-ups or movies. |
| The front web page for any site should load in 10-15 seconds or (much) less. The most common mistake made by businesses on the Net is trying to impress visitors with an exotic, animated web presentation that takes 5 minutes to load. No one cares how magnificent or astute your site is if you cannot deliver a page in under 15 seconds, max. |
Business websites should NEVER include:
- Sound: Long download, boring and of little or no benefit.
- Animation: Cute, but completely overrated. This includes Flash and Java micro-movies, swimming text, moving banners, pop-up and pop-under screen advertising, exotic 'mouseover' navigation and anything else that disrupts and stalls the page from being displayed. These things are only original once, if anyone stays long enough to view them. Thereafter, they are all a waste of time and an irritation.
- Large, patterned or multi-colored backgrounds: Graphic backgrounds should be small, load quickly, and not interfere with reading the text.
- Tiny text and long pages: Regardless of what you have to say, it has to be readable on everyone's monitor. Likewise, if you create pages that rival the length of the Dead Sea Scrolls your audience will abandon you.
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Business websites should ALWAYS include:
- Clear navigation: A means to move freely and fluidly throughout the pages and know where you are at all times.
- A theme: You must have some consistent look or identifying feel to your pages that mark them as being part of the site as a whole. It may be simple color, or dimensions in a header, or logos, or trademarks or other distiguishing features that can be instantly recognized and remembered.
- A registered domain name: Operating under anything other than a registered domain name of your own is completely futile. Without one you have no control, mobility nor any type of permanent recognition.
- Good layout and content: Depending upon the nature of your business or group, a good layout means combining graphics and text to create an overall attractive, enjoining presentation. Not decorating screens or entertaining visitors. I must reiterate: Fast, well-proportioned pages are a thousand times more efficient and successful than slow, redundant digital screenplays.
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