A few weeks back, I talked about the things that you should keep in mind when designing a web site. Again, if I haven't got the message across the first time, CONTENT is KING.

I am involved in a site redesign that will end up with at least 800 pages of text. The site is truly amazing in its depth, and the resources it offers are nothing short of phenomenal. I put together a plan to meta tag every page on
the site, including title, description, and keywords. I also created a links and header section for each page along with directory structure that included the major keywords. Needless to say, it is a task that requires nothing less than a lot of effort and time.

I am involved in a site redesign that will end up with at least 800 pages of text. The site is truly amazing in its depth, and the resources it offers are nothing short of phenomenal. I put together a plan to meta tag every page on
the site, including title, description, and keywords. I also created a links and header section for each page along with directory structure that included the major keywords. Needless to say, it is a task that requires nothing less than a lot of effort and time.

So, with all this effort and time spent, the last thing I wanted to see is, indeed, what I saw when I saw the design proofs for the home page and the content pages. The proofs were full of jpegs and graphics, with file sizes of over 100k. Knowing that the 28.8/33.6k modems are the prevalent modems in the US (the intended market), having a page that takes over a minute to download is unacceptable. Studies show that surfers get quite twitchy after 20 seconds and
the likelihood of their moving to another site are extremely high.

The pages are being redesigned once again. Understand that you can put the greatest plan together, and have it all come together. But, a "simple" thing like over-designing the site will ruin everything. Kind of reminds me about "leading the horse to water...". Think of it, thousands and thousands of searches and your site coming up at the top, or close to the top of every search. The searchers come to the site and find it takes them forever to get the information they were after. Some leave...Probably, a lot leave. Why not design the site to keep searchers happy in the first place? They came there
searching for one thing, the content (which is _______?).