How should your website look?
(The answer might depend on ... who's designing it.)

Cutting-edge technology. Stunning graphics. All the latest "bells and whistles." E-commerce.

These are the buzz-words of website design. According to the media, you need a whiz-bang website for effective e-commerce — business on the Web.

Let's address the visuals — what should your website look like?

Depending upon whom you talk to, opinions will vary widely as to what is necessary.

• Graphics designers may design gorgeous pages heavily laden with graphics ... which slow your pages to a crawl.
  
  
• Website designers may wow you with cutting-edge bells and whistles. But all browsers are not the same, and you may find yourself paying for separate "fixes" for each type of browser on the planet. Meanwhile, your website visitors wonder what all this whiz-bang stuff is doing on your woolen yarn website.
  
  
• Search engine specialists may (or may not) have the latest techniques for ranking in each search engine, but now your pages read strangely and are visually unappealing.
  
  
• Marketing ... what's that? Marketing is not just a matter of saying, "here's my product — buy it." Nor is filling your website with lame marketing hype the answer. Potential customers don't get stupider just because they're on the Web.
  
  
• And your neighbor's son — unless you want a "cool" website (often spelled "kewl" on the Web), you may be in for quite a shock.

A Matter of Logic ...
Determining a proper "look" for a website is partly a matter of marketing, and partly logic:

Your website designer is pressuring you into flashing, bouncing, neon graphics — great for a media outfit — but your company is a financial institution.

Or your website has become dated.

Or you're selling fresh flowers, but your graphics are drab and lifeless.

(Meanwhile, you wonder what's wrong, or decide that no one can make money on the Web.)

Web Design meets Internet marketing
The above simply illustrate incomplete approaches to web design.

People surf the Web to find whatever they are looking for, whether it's information, products and services, entertainment, among other things.

Your website visitors should be able to find what they're looking for and, hopefully, achieve their goals (and yours). That's what they came for.

How should your website look?

Your website should be designed so that your potential customers can identify with it. This means a look consistent with what they expect.

The graphics should illustrate and enhance your products and services. If you are a graphics designer or artist, then bring on the graphics! Otherwise, you must choose judiciously, balancing marketing and visual appeal with utility. A picture may say a thousand words, but a thousand graphics means the world's slowest download!

If you are selling something, by all means use marketing basics to impart your message.

An effective website design must contain these and other elements, properly integrated into a professional-looking website that is pertinent to your business or industry.

This doesn't mean it must look like everyone else's website. It just means it must be within the reality of your potential customers.