Fancy web design
Webdesigners emphasize fancy web design simply because that is what they do best.
Itis true that humans are primarily visual and that a well-designed look can makea good impression on visitors, especially if you have a commercial website.
Buteven the best design in the world is not going to bring anyone in. Thesearch engines are effectively blind robots. The search engines never can seeyour design and can’t distinguish between the most beautiful artwork in theworld 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.
Whileweb design can’t help build traffic, it can drive traffic away.
Thefirst problem is the classic “slow loading” web page. Most of the populartechniques for making a web page look really good also have the problem ofmaking the web page very slow loading, especially on older computers using slowconenctions.
Thedesigners tend not to notice the problem because they have very high speedconnections and are using the fastest and newest cmputers available. And theyoften are viewing their own work from their hard drives rather than over theinternet.
Someweb designers can even get arrogant about driving away traffic for the sake oftheir artwork. I know one web developer who insists on making his web sitesviewable only on computers that are connected to a large plasma display. Whilehis artwork is very impressive, what good does it do to have a web site thatless than 1% of the world can even see?
Thefact of the matter is that the typical person has no patience for a web sitethat takes more than a few seconds to load. The old rule of thumb was that mostof the web page had to load in less than a minute, but people don’t wait aminute anymore. You will be lucky to get more than a few seconds of patience.
Thesecond problem is the ratio of actual human readable text content to totalnumber of characters.
Mostweb pages with fancy design have 90% or more of the total number of charactersin the web page being devoted to invisible commands to the web browser. Thisburies the real human readable content that the search engines are evaluating,making the search engines think that you have very little to say about thetopic (keyword) at hand. So, they greatly downgrade your web page from theranking a human viewer might give you.