All good sites have a theme. Stick with the theme. Now you’ll be tempted, as I have many times (and at various times succumbed), to stray away from a theme because of something cool. You’ll find a super-cool article or page, and you’ll want to link to it, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with your site. If you really want your site to work well in search engines and be helpful to your visitors, stick with the theme. You can always grab another domain name and write a new site on gadgets or sports or the coolest new shoot ‘em up game.

Second, unless you’re demonstrating a certain talent as a part of some elaborate resume, don’t go overboard on the latest and greatest. Don’t use the wildest DHTML or write your whole site in Flash if you have an ecommerce site or a news site. Save that for the cool one you are doing on the side, if you really want to do it. Personally, I think a whole site in Flash is just lame anyway, because they go so overboard with the cool navigation that they forget that you actually have to get to places on the site, and you end up leaving because you can’t find what you want anyway.

• MySQL 5 Released and other upgrade banter by David Hickenbotham
• Estimating Web Development Projects by David Hickenbotham
• PHP Article Commentary by David Hickenbotham

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Design Tips, Development Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.