So your friend has a site with bells and whistles that looks great at initial glance. Let’s put a few things into consideration here. Frilly with gadgets is not always and not usually the best approach with web sites.

The main factors (and the most important) to consider for your site are:

1. How future Proof is it?
2. How Search Friendly is it?
3. How Dependant is it?
4. How Accessible is it?

What you need to remember is just because it may look good in your own preferred browser with your own preferred system settings, this will definitely not be the case for everyone viewing your site. We can show some examples of very large corporate companies, who spend a vast amount of cash on marketing, that you all know very well, who have very fundamental errors on their websites i.e. sole navigation menus becoming unusable, because of flash images.
Typical scenarios that can drastically affect the operation of your site:

• How the Browser interprets the data.
  
  
• How older versions of a browser will interpret the data
  
  
• The operating system the visitor is using
  (i.e Firefox looks different on Linux to Windows)
  
  
• The personal option settings of the user browser or system settings (javascript turned off etc)
  
  
• The settings that third party programs make on the viewers PC (with or without the users knowledge such as, internet security suites, toolbars, anti-popup software, anti-spam etc.)
  
  
• The specific search methodology used by various search engines.

Dependancy - Avoid the kill [X]

Dependancy. Todays sometimes over zealous requirement for security, especially in the workplace and educational institutions has called for even the simplest form of antivirus, spyware and advert protection to protect your systems from potential attack on the web. This is additional to the increased ‘lockdown’ mentality enforced upon any system by the network engineer in any form of business. The result is that the computer will ask for permission to download or use facilities for ‘everything’. This effects Javascript, Flash, VBScript, Activex Controls and Silverlight (MS competitor product for Flash) as the more well known culprits. Many people at home now freely choose to restrict their internet capabilities to the extent of blocking such facilities in the name of security.

So how do you make sure your site can be viewed, no matter what the customers security settings? What will work, what will work for everyone? Answer: Clean hardy XHTML, CSS and PHP…… They all do the job very well, the features cannot be turned off or blocked, and with a little extra effort, they can do plenty of bells and whistles too, without the overheads or risks. Programming for the Web

Unless youre site is based around Media content, as a general rule, we do not do Flash! - Primarily we mean complete Flash sites. It is bad for search, and bad for accessibility. Flash is generally used where there is a lack of content on the site or just simply to look a little bit, well, erm, ‘flash’. There are many sites that use large flash banners, they take a while to load, seriously confuse or drastically hinder site navigation, and many that repeatedly re-run the movie and sounds on every single page visited (those annoyances usually get responded to by hitting the big red X in the corner – Visitor lost). Basically, the more code snippets and gadgets in your website, the more dependant, degradable, the more up for misinterpretation and messy it becomes. You might think by having this cool bit of software on your site it's going to attract customers, when in fact it's not only going to deter them it's going to be completely unseen by millions of people who have it turned off or who have incompatible browsers to cope with the technology.

Search Ready – Right at the starting line

When it comes to websites, the biggest concern is how search friendly is it? Or will people find me easily?

Well, in laymen terms search engines work on visible text, literally, that's it. That counts out flash only sites or any site with a pre-loader (The search ‘robot’ cannot get past that or read anything that is contained within a flash movie). It is appalling just how many ‘pro’ web designers that offer no, alternate, standard content for the large portion of users who have the Flash feature turned off, or just not installed at all in their browser. In that worst case scenario your website would not be viewed at all, which is a big waste of money. Search ‘Robots’ are like the SAS, they get in, they get what they need, and they get out, FAST. They can only spend so long crawling and indexing your pages (Average 250 Milliseconds and an average download of only 300Kilobytes) which is no use if your page is buried knee deep in superfluous code, images and client side programming like Javascript. Find out more detail about SEO

Search Keywords, although an old method only really used by a few search engines like Yahoo, every keyword you use has to match a used visible word, and preferably used more than once. These words can't just be in a list format either as that's considered spamming or priming the search engine, which believe it or not is frowned upon. Search engine robots are increasingly intelligent and now actually demote your rank, bad key wording being only one example of an SEO booboo. No-one searches for a specific company name, they search for specific content and service. If you only put your company name out, then only ONE page will show IF the company name is searched for due purely to repetitive meta tags. SEO specialists are really a myth, there's no secret to being top of the search engines, it just takes time. All you need for a site to be SEO'd so to speak, is to use the keywords feature, submit the site to the search engines and make your text available and easy to read by the robots. We complete half of those tasks already, in any website we design. The rest, we do for free as part of the deal.

Design Principle
Another very important aspect, is that your site will be designed by a fully trained and experienced graphic designer specialised in Information graphics and typography. Text, colour and layout will be implemented taking much into consideration such as legibility for visitors with colour deficiency and clean speedy imagery. Web ready images and adaptation to customer provided logos and images are included in web services. Site design does not include corporate ID design such as advanced logo design or provision of image for print which is a separate service. A more basic priotity is that we ensure that there is sufficient contrast between fore and background colours. We also take accessibility issues into account such a gif image (and javascript) can cause screen flicker.
Creative Web Design