The goal is not to draw people away from the message with the design but to draw them to the message through good design.

Remember that there are a lot of people out there who charge big bucks to make it complicated. This caveat applies to software and hardware. A web site is a marketing tool, NOT a gee-whiz programming display. The more complex any system is, the more likely it is to go blooey.

Technological change is certain, and this means there is a danger of committing resources to endeavours that become obsolete almost overnight. This is one of the major reasons for avoiding proprietary programming unless absolutely neccesary for information transferral.

IT'S SO OBVIOUS NOBODY NOTICES, but it is the intrinsic fact that this information transferral is TWO-WAY that makes a website interactive. Thus the object of the exercise is to maximize the ease and reliability of information transferral in both directions: interactivity is maximized. The bottom line is that operational co-ordination is cohesively developed within your business environment.

Today's challenge is restraint: Web creation software is so powerful that it is easy to submit to enthusiasm, producing Web pages that are distractingly complex, and slow. You can see examples of how NOT to do web pages at Vincent Flanders' wonderful site, Web Pages That Suck

Just because one can dump everything but the kitchen sink on a page does not mean that one should.