The old saying that cleanliness is next to godliness should be applied to many web sites today. There are tons of sites on the Internet that can't decide if they are promoting their company or trying to attract gamblers from Las Vegas with the banners, animation, blinking and flashing ads, scrolling text and other distracting elements. These sites look like a bill board on the Vegas strip! Unfortunately these companies are trashing their web site with elements that probably have very little to do with the stated purpose of their site (see post below) and as a result all the junk on their site is just a distraction to visitors.
Research has proven over and over again that adding the newest and most "glittery" technology and animation you can find won't increase your conversions of prospects to customers. It may look cool and cost you a bunch of cash as your webmaster tells you how complex it was to create so he/she can keep their job, but at the end of the day it probably won't have any marginal effect on your bottom line.
Web sites should be kept lean and mean, which means minimal outside elements that aren't directly tied to the key purpose of your site. Create logical and intuitive navigation, plenty of white space, clean tasteful graphics that DON'T blink and flash to get attention. If they are designed well they will create a positive image without all the animation. However the most important element on the site is always and will always be the copy (text). People visit a site to learn things and the copy on the site needs to get their attention, be easy to read, and most important get them to take some type of action. Flashing graphics and spinning logos aren't going to do that, but powerful and well written copy will. Creating a site with these elements will always be more effective than the site that has too much junk on them and contains poorly written copy.
In Ayn Rand's famous book The Fountainhead the main character is an architect named Howard Roark. He is practicing his trade at a time when creating ornate buildings was the standard practice. The architects that are his competition believe all buildings need to have ornate carvings, pillars, and other dramatic designs more like a Greek temple than a modern office building. Roark stands alone among the men of his day that believe buildings should be clean and modern without all the excess of classical design. His ideas are attacked, but in the end we see today they are the standard rather than the exception. I know some of my ideas of minimal sites are also not shared by others in the industry. How could they be with all that cool Flash that let's you create the "classical" look to the site, but there are some, and the number is growing, that know the future of the web is well designed, clean, minimal sites with sharp copy.
If your site is one of those that looks like it belongs in Vegas then bust out the Mister Clean and get to work making a site that has a stated purpose and is minimally designed for that purpose with sharp and effective copy. Your business will thank you for it and so will your customers!
