There are millions of websites out there all vying for the attention of potential customers. Search Google for "website design" for example and you will get 719,000,000 results. Increase the chances of visitors to your site by concentrating your efforts on a few items rather than trying to do everything at once. Consider targeting a regional customer base as this may be easier to reach. Once you have decided the key objectives and what the keywords will be, you can start the design by choosing a suitable domain name and title for the site.
The primary purpose of a web site is to provide information to a potential customer. Hopefully the customer types your keywords into a search engine and your web site appears at the top of the search result list. So your customer clicks your site's link and they sit there waiting in anticipation for the information, only instead they have to wait for that fancy landing page to load, and then have to click again to enter the site, and then wait even longer for that "really cool" animation to finish.
If your web site takes more than 5 seconds to load, your visitor will soon become bored and frustrated, click the back button on the browser, and your chance of another potential customer has gone to the competition.
Navigation around your site must be obvious. Even the best information has no value if your customer can't find it! Text must be relevant, clear and concise, with the use of images only where appropriate.
At vine website design we ignore the fancy bells and whistles and concentrate on web site functionality instead.
