Fancy web design
Web
designers emphasize fancy web design simply because that is what they do best.
It
is true that humans are primarily visual and that a well-designed look can make
a good impression on visitors, especially if you have a commercial website.
But
even the best design in the world is not going to bring anyone in. The
search engines are effectively blind robots. The search engines never can see
your design and can’t distinguish between the most beautiful artwork in the
world and the ugliest, most garish web page oin the planet.
Summarizing:
web design can make visitors feel better about spending money at your website,
but web design can never create or bring in more web traffic.
While
web design can’t help build traffic, it can drive traffic away.
The
first problem is the classic “slow loading” web page. Most of the popular
techniques for making a web page look really good also have the problem of
making the web page very slow loading, especially on older computers using slow
conenctions.
The
designers tend not to notice the problem because they have very high speed
connections and are using the fastest and newest cmputers available. And they
often are viewing their own work from their hard drives rather than over the
internet.
Some
web designers can even get arrogant about driving away traffic for the sake of
their artwork. I know one web developer who insists on making his web sites
viewable only on computers that are connected to a large plasma display. While
his artwork is very impressive, what good does it do to have a web site that
less than 1% of the world can even see?
The
fact of the matter is that the typical person has no patience for a web site
that takes more than a few seconds to load. The old rule of thumb was that most
of the web page had to load in less than a minute, but people don’t wait a
minute anymore. You will be lucky to get more than a few seconds of patience.
The
second problem is the ratio of actual human readable text content to total
number of characters.
Most
web pages with fancy design have 90% or more of the total number of characters
in the web page being devoted to invisible commands to the web browser. This
buries the real human readable content that the search engines are evaluating,
making the search engines think that you have very little to say about the
topic (keyword) at hand. So, they greatly downgrade your web page from the
ranking a human viewer might give you.