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My design philosophy is: simple.
Just because you can do something flashy doesn't
necessarily mean you should!Sure, you could welcome your
customers with a 1.2 megabyte Flash movie, complete with a spiraling company logo,
techno score, and (of course) the ubiquitous "click here to skip intro"
button. But I believe the first question to ask yourself when designing a website
-- or hiring someone to do it for you -- is "Will this help the customer
find what he or she needs?" If the answer isn't at least a firm Maybe,
then think twice about adding the effect.
It's About Bandwidth
On the web, where the majority of users still use a dial-up modem to browse,
size is everything. If it's not quick to download, most consumers won't wait
for it. That means most intro movies, while big on the "Cool!" factor,
are also big on the "wait" factor. That's also true of big graphics,
especially if they haven't been compressed correctly. (For example, my biggest
pet-peeve on the web is the misuse of GIF versus
JPG compression. It's a little thing that can make an enormous difference
in loading times.)
The Case for Originality
Another sad fact of small business web sites is that many designers rely on
templates to create their pages. Not only are these pages usually bandwidth-intensive
(those made by a certain popular word processor are notoriously bloated), they
look just like everyone else's! There is little joy in going to a web page,
only to find that it uses the same old graphics that you saw yesterday on another
page. Worse, a site from a template doesn't usually fit the company's mission
or real-life "look and feel." I believe in understanding the nature
of a business, and building its website to reflect that, as you will see in
past productions.
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