Keep It Simple: Some Things To Consider Before Contacting A Designer...

You don't need mega-feature movies, splash screens and over-developed interfaces to add interest to your website; it's expensive and - if employed incorrectly - could really slow page-loading down quite a bit, keep you from getting indexed with the popular search engines and potentially cost you clients. Also consider that folks are becoming increasingly bored and annoyed with long wait times - they want what they came for, end of story. If you are offering a product or service, visitors to  your website aren't there to watch a dazzling, 45 second display of power and object manipulation with Flash - unless, of course that is your product or service, in which case you want your visitors to see what is possible and what you and your associates are capable of producing.

Our experience has been that something short and sweet (that doesn't interfere with the loading of other page content) is expedient, cost effective and it doesn't present issues with search engine indexing. Below are a few examples of simple things that can be done to create a balanced level of interesting features/effects for a web.

"The Living Module"

Your "Splash Screen", as it were, could be a simple animation of your logo that does not pre-empt other content loading. The 'Module' animation was created for the actual VBA Express website - now the 'VBA Express Portal'. The animation created some interest and page content was not pre-empted by it's presence.

"Max Goes Ani-Max!"

Max Cell has been with MrExcel for a long time and Max has gone through some changes since his debut. One thing that we were able to do for Max was to give him more dimension by adding motion to his limbs and posture - now Max can do more than just stand around looking good! He can run, jump, go skate boarding, run construction equipment...pretty much anything he wants!