I would love to have a cool looking site, like Keith Wiley or Sidian, but designing such a site takes a great deal of hard work. It is about much more than technology. It takes imagination and visual flair.

Get it wrong and you end up with a lame site such as The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers or The Deming Institute. The IEEE is a great organisation. I would not pay $300 a year membership dues if it wasn't. Guess how pleased I am that the website is unnavigable on my home machine. The design of the Deming Institute's pages is outsourced to Civic Resource Group. I assume this is why the style is familiar. Dr. W. E. Deming is one of the major figures of the 20th Century. His theoretical insights into the nature of process improvement complement the work of Adam Smith. In practical terms, exploiting his insights has made billions for companies such as Toyota. I doubt you realised this from the website.

I realise that organisations face a tougher set of challenges than the designer of a personal home page. The visual imagery cannot be so intense. There is a real world mission, whose content may be ill-suited to web presentation. The site will be larger, and navigation becomes an issue. Users cannot search a large site for information by sequentally downloading big, slow pages packed with content, until they find the right one. Lightweight navigation pages, with informative link names are crucial. But it can be done. The Society for Barefoot Living website is the example to follow.

If you are having trouble "getting it" from my examples, ponder this: if I muddled up the pictures amongst these five websites, would you notice, would you care, could you put them back on the right sites? Pictures take time, queuing in the network and downloading. They consume patience, a valuable commodity in the modern world. If you neither notice nor care that you receive the correct ones, they are a waste.

Conclusion

If you lack the vision and skill to make a success of a flash website, leave your's bare. That is my advice and I'm taking it.