Website Appearance - the 'Look & Feel'

Some designers employ graphic designers to produce an image of the page that is 'sliced' to accommodate the HTML code. These pages are usually impressive but often take little account of the purpose of the website. Websites are not pretty pictures that demonstrate the ability of the graphic designer. Websites are machines whose purpose is to make money.

A web site/page should guide a visitor effortlessly. It is still common to see 'wall to wall' text with virtually no space around it. The space between the lines is too small and the worst mistake is a 'right-aligned' border. To this end, space where there is nothing (white space) is hugely important to isolate and connect passages of text.

Most people undervalue the space their website occupies. Literally, it is worth millions yet it is littered with detritus in the belief that visitor is going to benefit in some way.

Twitter bars, tag clouds, subscribe boxes, Google ads etc. etc. A chief culprit is the huge header graphic that is half the page depth. Visitors come to your website to make a decision - go there, buy that. The bulk of the decision making results from the text, not the picture.

A worse calumny is the Flash header. Flash dissolve slideshows are bad enough but to add whizz bang animation confirms that the designer has lost the plot and guarantees that your visitor wil be irritated beyond words.