Take a look around the web today and you will notice a common theme among the big players. Their sites are becoming more plain and simple. Of course, Google has always followed the simple is better rule for web site design and it obviously has paid off for them. Hooray for the designers behind the shift. I dont know about you but I am tired of going to web sites and being bombarded by advertisements, sounds, and flash. It is very distracting and almost always forces me to leave the site without seeing any of the real content.

Recently, I decided to take the same approach with my own site. I took some time to review all my content and put it into two buckets, useful and not useful. I was amazed at how much junk I was able to remove from my site without removing any meaningful content. I also spent a few days scaling back my graphical content. Instead of using a bunch of meaningless images, I decided to pick a pleasant color scheme and only use necessary images. The result is amazing. With a little effort, I now have a site that is fast loading and easy on the eyes.

After the remodel, I decided to attack the navigation. I set up one small section on each page with only a few links. I removed any graphical menus and replaced them with simple text that changes colors when you hover over them with the mouse. The result of all this is that visitors to my site can identify the navigation within the first seconds of their visit.

There is another advantage to this approach. COST! You can easily save yourself hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars by just keeping it simple. It also eliminates the possibility of getting the run-around from your web site developer. In fact, I cant imagine charging more than $300.00 for a simple web site design and you probably shouldnt pay more than that.

If you have a web site, take a look at it and see what you can do to clean it up. You might just save yourself some money and gain some customers at the same time.