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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 seven web sites that survived the crash, and went on to profitability. You will see a common pattern to these sites:

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.Unfortunately since this page was first written, almost all of these companies have "tarted up" their websites. Specifics below.

Yahoo! – information cram was inevitable with Yahoo, since it is a portal. Nevertheless they've been cautious in how often or radically they change layout. It still works.

eBay – the site is suffering information cram, but still has the 1-2-3 steps front and center.

PayPal – the way it should be. One professional graphic to show "we're players", and everything else is information.

Advanced Book Exchange – still sticking to the information, this site wisely used color for interest, instead of piling on irrelevant graphics.

Cisco – the site has gotten less businesslike with the addition of overlarge ego graphics, which in turn has forced "link cram" on the designer. However the two key links are still where they should be, in the upper left: Products and Ordering.

SeaEagle – a busy page, but necessary. They deal with first-time visitors, and have to show their product range immediately. Within that limitation, everything else is done right: there are only two irrelevant images, all the rest are product shots; the 800 number and guarantee at the top say "We want to do business!"; the sales copy starts at the top and goes to the bottom; and the full product line is visible down the left side of the page.

– (Removed from list: Cleansleeves, which has buried the top screen under irrelevant images, pushed the information down to the second screen – and to add to the confusion, changed their name, when they were already becoming well-known.)

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.

Readers of this page may also be interested in reading our web page Successful Ecommerce Business Models.