Road Kill: Good Web Pages vs. Bad Web Pages.

Never mind the experts, never mind what they taught you in school, and never mind your competitors, put a stake in the ground and define the purpose of your web site. Then make it deliver that functionality. Don't get lost in layers of pretty design or unnecessary technology.

What is a good web site? Ever been on a web site trying to do something that you were supposed to be able to do on that site and couldn't? That's not a good web site then. It doesn't matter how good it looks, how much effort went into the color scheme, or how slick the JavaScript code is that makes the little rollover buttons, if I can't find what I'm looking for, then it's not a good web site, it's a bad web site.

Ok then, what's a bad web site? Have you ever been on a site that looked like a 4th grader made it? Ugly font choices, strange colors, plain links instead of pretty buttons and Flash animation? But, did you find what you were looking for? Did you get the information you were after? If so, it's a good web site.

Functionality is more important than looks. People will not stay on a web site that is hard to use. They will not return to a web site that does not work like it should.
Your web site can be functional and look good, all it takes is planning and possibly less work than you would have put forth on a more complex, overly done design.

Have you ever been driving down a back country road and have a deer run out in front of you? The deer just stands there staring at your headlights and he or she doesn't know which way go. Don't do this to your web site visitors.
Don't present them with 103 choices and flashing lights, buzzers, and whistles when they land on your home page.
Your visitors may never make the choices that you want or that you assume they will. Keep each page focused and simple. Don't make someone work to purchase something from you, it should be easy for them.

Create better pages by minimizing the use of layout packages like Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe GoLive, or DreamWeaver and do more coding by hand. Learn HTML so that you can start a page in one of these layout packages (ifnnecessary) and then finish and maintain the page in a text or HTML editor. By doing this, you'll understand your pages better, you'll know how they work, and you'll be able to modify them faster.

I've created a lot of web sites and it's by far easier to modify and change the ones that I've coded by hand as opposed to the few that were built entirely in a layout package. Packages like FrontPage change over time. When you open a site you created two years ago in layout package "x"nversio
"
" with the current version, and it no longer looks like it should, you'll understand why I edit my own HTML! Or, when you spend hours trying to get something to line up in a layout package only to start looking at the HTML code and realize that it's a mess, then you'll understand why I like to edit my own HTML! But the main reason is that once you understand HTML and how it works, it's easy to just do it by hand!

If your site is supposed to sell something, then focus on selling. If it's an information site, then focus on providing information. If you want both, then maybe you should create two sites and link between them where necessary. Your goal should be clean, simple, and functional web pages that deliver to the end user the content or service that the web site was intended to provide.