The most common and biggest mistake an Internet marketer can make to his/her website is to use too many pictures/graphics, animations, sounds, etc. Yes, there are a lot of cool looking gizmos and fancy options that are available to add to your website. But resist using them!

I’m sure you’ve all seen websites that have a giant picture as the background to their website like a forest, buildings, clouds, little envelopes or any number of picture backgrounds that are far too busy and make any site look like a kid made it. And on top of these amateur looking background pictures, people do even stupider things like put flaming letters at the top of their website.

That is so un-professional looking that it’s not even funny. I go on to websites every day that have these irritating and confusing mistakes all over their sites. As soon as I enter most websites these days, a pop-up window flies out of no where, or a menu box slides over from the side and follows me around the website getting in the way of the words I’m trying to read. Now that’s irritating!

These are all bad ideas for any website and will once again cost you time and money. Not only do these types of sites look irritating to the eye and confuse your readers, but an equally huge problem is that these types of websites take up to 20 times longer to fully open up and load into a browser. It’s just a known fact that the average internet shopper/surfer is in a hurry and will only wait about 7 seconds for your website to load. And if you’re site is still loading all those heavy graphics, animations, and sounds, the internet surfer/shopper will click away and go some where else before 7 seconds is up.

Since you’re website must fully load within 7 seconds even on a 56k modem connection, you better make sure your website has very few pictures, graphics, animations, and sounds. In fact I suggest you don’t use sound on your website at all. I also would completely avoid the use of any animations. The only thing on your website should be one or two small, well placed graphics or pictures and your content(words/text)

Many marketers these days are using animated gifs and java scripting that makes logos spin and images move across the screen etc. Again, this not only causes your website to be slow loading, but it also distracts from your sales message/ad copy. Internet surfers are hungry for information and are searching for solid content to read so always keep your focus on good reading material and not pretty images.

It’s very simple logic we are using here: The faster your website pops up, the more readers you’ll get and the more sales you’ll take in. I recommend you use a website template that has lots of “Tables” in it. No, not the kind of tables you eat at. The term “Tables” is an html website design term that refers to fast loading images that are actually not “Real” images. They are really just colored square boxes that come in every size you can think of from the size of a tiny square all the way up to the size of your whole screen.

Tables can be simple solid colored rectangles, thick lines, outlines, and even borders with different colors. And even though they are simple, they look great and make your website load faster than using graphic images and pictures. If you have questions about how to get a nice looking website with tables just ask me or any website designer about them. For an example of a website with tables, you can look at my website at www.OnlyReviews.com. That website was made using almost 100% tables. That’s why it’s such as fast loading website. If you need help understanding tables or having a website with tables built, you can call my website designer at 970-874-8079. His name is Milt.

If you want my opinion on how a website should look, simple is better. Simple will always make you more money than complicated. Your readers don’t care about a bunch of fancy graphics and images. They came to your website for one reason: They want fast information that’s going to either help remove some sort of frustration or pain from their life or help them gain more pleasure, relaxation, income and freedom in their life. It’s that simple! That’s all there is to it so don’t make it more complicated than that!

Even if you did have a slow loading website over-loaded with graphics, animations, pictures, and sounds, and someone did actually wait longer than 7 seconds for it to load, you’ll still have a big problem. All that extra stuff on your site would distract them from being able to quickly find the information they’re looking for. Throughout the whole history of the world, there has never been a more impatient animal than the “Internet Surfer/Shopper” You must be quick and to the point if you plan to tame them and capture them(get money from them)