The Net Effect creates unique and easy to use Web Sites for a wide variety of industry sectors working with budgets both large and small. We have the experience and the expertise to ensure your Web Site excels and these clients agree!

TNE created Web Sites are designed to be downloaded with the minimum of delay to capture the attention of your potential clients. We know that this simple but extremely effective approach allows our clients to harness this new medium to their best advantage.

With a professionally-designed Web Site, you can offer instantaneous access to your firm's strategy, performance, product information - or any other data you want visitors to see.

Most web designers and web design companies will try to convince you that if you want your business to have the best site possible that you MUST have a flash site. Flash, for those of you who are newbies, is a software program that can create really cool special effects and animations. You can either have flash elements embedded in your website or you can have your entire website done in flash. Now I will be the first to tell you that Flash can make a site look pretty cool, but if you are actually trying to make some money from your online business that using flash is a BIG no-no. Here's why.

1. Too Much Time

It takes way too much time to download an all flash website. Even though broadband and DSL users are growing there are still too many people that are still on dial up to rely on using an all flash site. Your potential customers will get ticked off at waiting an hour to download your beautiful website and will leave to go to the next one. A lot of times, designers will say that they can fix the download problem by making smaller portions or chunks of the main site. So instead of having to wait for just one huge file, you now have to wait for a huge file every time you click on a button to go to another part of the site. It does not fix the problem at all. Your customers are still going to get ticked after they click on your product button and then realize they have to wait another 8 minutes to download that page too.

2. Annoying Intro

I see a lot of websites that have these flash designed intros. The concept is to have a really cool looking intro to the company or product before launching the main website. First of all, I have seen some really pathetic attempts at flash intros. If you can't design a good one you should definitely not try at all. Second, most people search for the skip intro button and just click past it anyway. Or if you don't have a skip intro button, they just leave your website all together because they don't want to watch your useless and annoying intro. I know that they can be cool, that everyone seems to have one, but unless your website is already bringing in some big time money, then don't risk losing customers by using a flash intro.

3. Not much Content

It seems to be a common problem that a lot of sites that rely on a completely flash design are lacking in the content department. They seem to think that by having lots of cool, flashy elements and designs that their visitors will not notice they are lacking in anything substantial to offer. Make sure you have good relevant content in your website, the more the better.

4. Search Engines Don't Like Flash

Websites that are done completely in flash, all face one BIG problem. The search engines have nothing to index for your site. In your HTML file you simply have a piece of code that calls up the flash file to play. The search engines can't read this file or what is in it so they have no idea how to index your site and just skip right over it. You must have readable text and content if you ever have the hopes of getting in the top 10 search results. You will never ever get in the top rankings with an all flash website. It's just not going to happen.

5. Flash Headers and Navigation

Some websites have the header portion of their sites display a cool flash picture or have their navigational buttons done in flash. You can get away with this if you have lots of other good quality content for the search engines to read. If you use a flash based navigation, include links to your other pages within the body of your text as well as text links at the bottom of the page. Search engines won't be able to read the flash navigation and won't know there are any other pages to index if you don't also have the text links in place.

6. No Plug in

Some Internet users don't even have the Flash plug in installed on their computer. Some people don't like to download anything from the Internet or have never even heard of flash. If they don't have the plug in then your site won't even be visible to them. Even if you put a script up to tell them to go get the Flash plug in, most people won't even bother. This is just another annoying problem to a potential customer. Now you are armed with proof that using flash in your website is a very stupid thing to do if you want to make any money. If your web designer insists on trying to convince you otherwise, then print out this article and smack him over the head with it. If he still won't listen then find a new designer.

Consultation about the purpose and motivation of your Web Site closely followed by planning the structure and content is the key to a successful Internet presence.

After our visit we shall create a Web Site plan and a quotation based on the findings from our consultation. The quotation will be broken down into individual items to ensure that you are always in control of the cost to you. It is very important to us that you are happy and confident of each stage of development.

We create pages using "adaptive HTML" which adjusts itself to the user's environment. We use HTML 4.0 compliant code (as defined by the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium) to provide robust, platform independent documents.

We plan site navigation with particular reference to the future expansion plans of your Web Site, with the goal, always in mind, of allowing each visitor to quickly find their particular area of interest. We optimise images and other multimedia content in formats appropriate to the needs of striking a balance between visual quality and speed of download.

There are many benefits of investing in a Web presence.

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