Part I
One of the great things about the World Wide Web is that even the 
"little guy" can be big.

Your website can give the appearance of a large organization, even 
when it's just you and the family dog, sitting in your kitchen in 
your underwear (not the dog, you in your underwear!). It's all 
about presence and appearance. This article discusses how to make 
your website look large, even when what is behind it is just 
getting started. The World Wide Web is making more millionaires 
faster than any other phenomenon in history.

ELEMENTS OF A WINNING SITE

The elements that make a website a "winner" are the following:

1.  Loads Fast
2.  Looks Great
3.  The links actually work
4.  Quick response when people request information, report trouble
5.  Is Useful
6.  Is Interesting
7.  Serves a great need
8.  Is Fun
9.  Offers lots of free stuff
10. Presents an appearance in keeping with whatever you are selling
11. Sells in a very subtle way
12. Is not like everyone else's
13. Does not use email addresses retrieved from its contents to 
    "Spam" people
14. Has some kind of newsletter that allows visitors to keep in 
    touch on an ongoing basis
15. Has clear navigation

Now we'll discuss these elements, one at a time. Miss any of 
these crucial elements, and your website traffic will suffer. 
Ignore none of them, if you want people to "show up". Just 
like a boring preacher has a hard time getting people to come 
to church, just providing good choir music is not going to make 
up for it. Your website may look good, but if it serves no
purpose whatsoever or is not clear in its message, it'll flop 
like one of those movies that doesn't make it in the box office 
because the first group of people to see it keep the rest of 
them from showing up.

The first thing you have to make sure of is that going to your 
website is not frustrating:

1. Loads Fast:  If your website loads so slow that people get 
bored waiting for it, your business will never get out of the 
starting gate. Large graphics, lots of those great java scripts, 
lots of background bitmaps, and a slow server to run on are some 
of the causes of this. No one will ever stay long enough to find 
out what you're selling if your pages are slow. The best way to 
test your site is to get on an average connection and time it 
with a stopwatch. You may be operating on a DSL or cable modem 
connection, so it's best if you can visit a friend who has a 
dialup and see how your website loads for him/her.

Make sure your web hosting provider gives you enough bandwidth 
and a fast connection. We experienced this problem (among others) 
while stuck in a 2 year contract with a hosting provider. We've 
since switched to another provider and don't have this problem 
anymore. See Web Hosting to find out where we went for better 
bandwidth. No matter what we did to make our Website load fast, 
our foundation was not good enough to make people want to come 
back. More than a few seconds to get to your website, and your 
site goes down in history as not being seen, along with all the 
websites hosted at places where websites are free. (You probably 
know who they are) If you have huge graphics and all kinds of 
whirlygigs and java scripts that would make a grown man cry, your 
site is in trouble again. Try to make all your graphics small and 
in a .jpg (jpeg) format.

If you must use moving gifs or other animated stuff, make it 
something useful that replaces text information. It must have 
some use on your page - not just to look good. And try to make 
it only one per page, if you can. If you love java, be aware of 
a couple of issues with fancy java scripts: Not everyone can see 
them if they don't have the right browser or the latest version 
of some browsers, not everyone is going to appreciate that their
mouse leaves "trails" across the screen, or that everything on 
your site is what they call a mouseover (where an image changes 
into something else when you run your mouse over it). Leave this 
stuff to your "other" site - you know, the one you wrote for fun. 
Try to keep this stuff to a minimum on a business website.

A plain white background is always better than some fancy, 
bandwidth-eating background bitmap image. If you must have a 
background image, make it a very small watermark-style image. 
Better to leave it plain. Makes it easier to read for many people 
who don't have the greatest video card or the best pair of eyes.

One side note: It's always good to test your website's pages in 
another screen resolution. If you like to keep your resolution 
(right-click on the desktop in Windows, go to settings, change 
the slide bar) at 1024x768, test your site using 800x600 and 
possibly 640x480. You can also put some javascripts that test 
the user's screen resolution and adjust accordingly, or you can 
put a disclaimer on your main page that says: "Best when viewed 
in 800x600 resolution". You decide how easy to make it for your 
visitors. Remember that things that may look great on your machine 
might look like crap to someone with their screen resolution set 
differently.

The next thing to make sure of after they actually get to your 
site is whether or not it looks good.

When I return, I'll discuss how to make your website credible 
with a great look.

====================================================================

Lynne Schlumpf is the CEO of Route 66 Cyber Cafe, Inc.,
http://www.r66cci.com,  a Web hosting and design company 
specializing in promoting websites for new owners, building 
affordable e-commerce sites, and providing reliable web hosting 
solutions as an affiliate of Virtualis Incorporated. She is the 
author of the forthcoming book "Let Your Little Website Shine", 
due out in publication approximately May 30, 2000.