Ta for those, Dien

The most valuable message that jumped out from those pages was "Make the potential customer comfortable" . Throw them off with too much stuff splashed around the page, distracting their eyes from your message, and you've lost them

If you look back on google, when it first started, it provided what people wanted, a clean page with only the search box, and nothing else. At the time, astalavista, yahoo, etc had craploads of adverts, news.... their search pages were chaos, as they were trying to monotise their search engine traffic at the time. And look at google now

Basicly, just follow the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid. Function over form.

In saying that, I firmly believe that a well designed, clean, attractive page *will* sell better than a whole bunch of text thrown on the screen in huge blocks. Obviously there are many sites that are selling very well using poor design, but how much better could they do with a basic makeover?

I *hate* having to "work" to get the information I'm after. I'll persist reading through masses of text, but my mood hits the floor pretty quickly. How many sales have been lost because people got tired of trying to absorb the information on a web page?

Back to the comfortable idea. Many people are somewhat afraid of the net. There is a need to build up a certain "trust" with these people. One thing almost everyone is familiar with is TV. At the moment, video presentations on these websites seems to be vastly underutilized, and would seem to be the simplest way to reach out to a non-tech savvy audience.