Why Pay Hundreds of Dollars for a Web Site Only to Have It Lost in Cyberspace?
SAVE BIG on Effective Web Design

If all you want is to be seen on the Internet; to get response from your customers or friends then you do not need all the high priced bells and whistles of a fancy graphics and or flash intensive site. Such sites look good and are often eye catching yes, but the truth is that they seldom deliver the message that you wish to convey. Marketing professionals, online and offline know flashy presentations seldom deliver. This is why you do not see these kinds of fanciness at big sites like the US government, Microsoft Corporation, Amazon.com, ebay.com Yahoo.com or Google to name a few.

This might come as a shock to folks who would spend hundreds of dollars on web design in efforts to come up with the most flashy and attractive sites but this is not the way to go. If all you want is to impress your close friends about your creative taste, well maybe so. Well, if you send them the URL, they will surely visit your site but ask them what it's all about and perhaps nine out of ten would have no idea.

But why is this so, why are the bells and whistles no, no in cost effective web design?

I tell you a few reason why:

Because from a search engine/directory perspective:

1. Spiders do not read information contained in graphics; and frames, flash, JAVA etc make it difficult for a search engine to read a page so they might simply ignore such pages. Hence your high priced bells and whistles pages might not even be listed by a search engine or find themselves at the bottom of the pile.
2. Bells and Whistles also slow down a site and directory reviewers do not favor them; Especially sites containing meaningless but fancy doorway pages that pop up while the real pages take far more time to load.

And from a browser perspective:

1. Flashy pages serve as distractions. They are good attention getters alright but the problem is that they are often too good at it: good to the point that most surfers often give them their full attention, forgetting about the message of the site entirely. But like I said, if all you want to do is to impress a few of your friends with no other goal or aim in mind, well fine but that approach is not conducive to effective communication.
2. Most surfers are busy and do not have time to waste on a site that takes "forever" to load. They will simply move on to a more user friendly site if yours take too long to load. And too long could be anywhere from 6-20 seconds. The point is that the more plug-ins (music & video files), java, flashes and graphics that you use is the slower that your site will become. The slower that your site become is the more likelihood that surfers will leave your site even before they see you fancy high priced presentations.

I must concede however, frames, plug-ins, flash and java could be useful. But they should only be use to help surfers find what they want; to make it easier for a surfer to navigate a site. In this sense, they can be tremendously useful but only with a conspicuous presence like a computer utility program: a facilitator, a backdrop, a silent search companion.

---

The bottom line is this:if you want a presence on the Internet but believe that you need to spend hundreds of dollars on a fancy flashy site, you don't. You are missing almost nothing by cutting down on the frills.

Why Pay Hundreds of Dollars for a Web Site Only to Have It Lost in Cyberspace?
SAVE BIG on Effective Web Design

Get your ideas or business online for a reasonable fee
For first-hand briefing, please respond to:
Donald S. Stewart
422-A Red Cross, LaSalle, Qc., H8R 2X9, Canada
Tel: (514) 368-5162 Email: tradeways@sympatico.ca

---