Your WWW - Forget the Bells and Whistles

Some people's websites are works of art, and I love looking at them and exploring them. The problem is that the message often gets lost in the flash and the pictures and the sheer artistry of it all, and finding the information that I actually want sometimes becomes so difficult that I eventually give up and go and look for it somewhere else.

In fact, quite a lot of websites that I look at these days remind me of a television advertisement that was shown over and over many years ago. It featured a tiger racing across sand dunes, and it was an extraordinarily beautiful piece of photography of an extraordinarily beautiful animal. It was intended, of course, to induce people to buy one brand of petrol rather than another. The difficulty lay in remembering what the product was, never the mind the brand, once the image of the cat had gone from the screen but was stuck in your head...

The whole point of having a website is to inform other people of whom you are, what your product or service is, how they can get hold of you or it, and how quickly.

Keep your website simple stupid. Bells and whistles are wonderful, but they do tend to be distracting.