What elements do you require in your web site. Five individual companies may have five different answers!
What ever the site content, products, services or information, there has to be a defined "call to action" for the site to work. More importantly the fundamental information that the web site visitor is seeking has to be blatantly obvious.
Good web design is all about communication and the message or "call to action". It is not all about design flair, bells and whistles, huge Flash based image sequences! As an example if we look at a travel property web site there are a few things that absolutely have to be obvious for that web site to work. Let's have a look at travel as an example.
The first important item is the price range of the accommodation on offer. This entails the way the information is presented from a design perspective, but there has to be an obvious link to a rates page that has easily understandable tariffs. This defines the very first travel question - "Can I afford this holiday destination?"
Second is possibly availability. If the site has a real time booking system that is straight forward and doesn't require logging in or disclosing personal details, the site user can satisfy the availability question. If there is no online booking system a simple enquiry form will do the trick just as well - although not quite as instant! But locating the form - finding the booking information is really this type of web site's "call to action". If the tariffs and the booking mechanism are not obvious the site cannot perform the basic function of selling bed nights.
Just as a side issue to this, many online property web sites use third party affiliate site booking facilities, that they make available to the property owner for a commission. Many property owners don't allocate many rooms to these booking systems, as they loose upwards of 10% from each booking. So what indefinitely happens is the site user checks for availability, there isn't any, so he or she moves onto the next property search and the site owner has just lost any chance of doing business. I have raised this as regardless of the type of site that you own, you really have to think through the web site process "from the site user's perspective" - simple to say; however many people just don't consider this at all!
Thirdly the physical location of a travel web site is also important and just how well the rooms and overall property are presented is vital as well. This is where design flair really comes into its own; a well coordinated web site will always out perform an amateurish looking presentation. Not sometimes - every time!
Flash Web Site Technology and Web Design - "Usability"
Flash is perhaps one of the greatest portable web technologies that has ever hit the web. That said it is most often used in an inappropriate way as the download times can be excessive. Who is going to wait for a large download that floats a butterfly across your screen while the images fade in and out? Who really care how clever the design is from a technical viewpoint? All a site user wants is information that is easy to find, presented in a clean and crisp manor.
The good design rule for any communication is 8 seconds. That is about how long a new web site visitor will sit around waiting to see your splendid design. If your download times are over that barrier, forget the Flash component! Web sites that are wrapped in a Flash project are also a complete waste of time as the search engines will not bother sifting through the code looking for content hints. Especially when they can hit a CSS/XHTML web site and have everything they require is milliseconds.
Flash is perfect for effects galleries; for user routines - loading pictures into a gallery through a back-end of a web site for example; definitely as a video delivery tool. Not only is Flash now universal with about 98% of site users having the players installed, the Flash video encoding is first class and really unbeatable when it comes to compressing video for online steaming.
So Flash has its place - but not in long and slow introductions - especially if the target audience are most likely not using broadband or may be from overseas; but it has its place and will only improve the web experience if used correctly.
Design For Your Target Web Audience
After all these years online we have learned to measure everything; that is one fantastic aspect of the internet as a marketing platform - everything is quantifiable!
At Queensland Net we insist on being informed; these statistics really show where the site is headed and assists with ongoing development paths for the site owner. Statistics ensure that you are designing for common screen sizes, allow you to know what search terms were used to locate you, countries of origin and handy items like how many seconds they stayed on your front page! Very interesting information that shows you exactly how your site is performing!
If you are investing time and money into a web site it is only fair and reasonable to have the tools to measure the effectiveness of the overall project. Solid statistics give you this information. In the hands of a professional web developer you can maximise the return on your investment!