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It took two hundred years for the principles of print layout to be refined. Thanks to the dot-com market crash, the principles of effective web site design are progressing more rapidly. Here are six web sites that survived the crash, and went on to profitability. You will see a common pattern to these sites:

Yahoo!

eBay

PayPal

Advanced Book Exchange

Cleansleeves

Cisco

1. Clear copy
2. Clean layout
3. Minimal graphics
4. Well-thought navigation
5. Information-rich home page
6. Cuts to the chase

These are pretty simple principles. Obviously, executing them is harder than it looks, because very few web sites are profitable. Note: Some of these sites actually look a bit clunky. But the customers clearly don't care, since they are buying the products and services.

Hastings does plenty of work in high-end graphics, Flash, and other forms of animation, and these things can be extremely effective when used for intranets, product demos, or training courses. But they rarely belong on an e-commerce web site.

Please see samples of our successful web sites at Client/Samples.

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