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Your website should succeed in fulfilling its purpose. Everything on your website should drive that purpose. If a graphic or text is not helping to sell your products or your services, not entertaining and captivating your audience, not delivering your message, it doesn't deserve to be there.
Design, copy and build have to be intertwined. If your website design is stunning and cutting edge, but your copy is sub-literate, you undermine your customer's confidence in you. If your website looks good and reads well, but the order form doesn't work, you'll lose that customer. I believe that a website has to work, right down to the smallest hyperlink. I do the work to make sure it does.
A website has to be as easy to use by the person who on the Internet for the first time as it is for experienced Internet surfers. I never make your visitors guess about anything. They will always know where they are, what they are looking at, where they can go to from where they are, how to get there, and how to get back. I believe in clarity, simplicity, and ease of use. I don't put my design before your needs.
You can have whirling, bouncing animations on your site, but unless you are selling bouncy, whirly things, why would you? You can have a Flash introduction--but have you noticed that they tend to have a 'skip intro' button? These technological gizmos tend to be there for the web designer's ego--and to boost up the cost. Why would you distract your visitors from your message, throw away your bandwidth--which you pay for--and waste your visitors' time, to show off a gizmo? Pointless gimmicks are pointless gimmicks. I don't use them.
My sites are designed with both browser compatibility and backward compatibility in mind. Your visitors, no matter what the age of their computers, should be able to see your site and navigate through it. What works in one browser doesn't always work in another. While no website can ever look exactly the same on every browser or on every screen, your website should communicate your message to every single visitor using any combination of software and hardware and I make sure it will.