Brett_Tabke - 1:46 pm on Jan 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

Altavista went portal in late 98 with a very large eye candy homepage stocked with everything. Their fortunes have stair stepped downward every since.

Excite went portal in 98 and slowly built up their home page in to this gaint thing. Again very visually appealing, and they've not been heard from since.

Infoseek had a great low key home page, and then were bought out by Go.com that cranked open the floodgates of page designers. They closed the doors on theirs just a short 20 months later.

Lycos redesigned their homepage about 9 months ago in to a stuning and well structured homepage template that could win design awards. Their stats have been stair stepping downard ever since.

Hotbot was the 'hot' engine in 98. Then they put up that over blown dayglo green template that just screamed "go away if you aren't 13 years old" and their fortunes have been going down hill every since.

Goto.com had killer branding on that green logo - they even defended with a suit against Go.com. Then they changed the name and went with the overpowering homepage that is stunning but over designed and technically challenged by 3rd party browsers - their fortunes have been stairstepping downwards too.

There are many reasons for the above including the dot com slow down, the drying up of vc money, and sites running out of initial vc money, but I think there is a pattern. It is simply the more over designed you make your page, the higher the likelyhood that you won't be around in a couple over years.

Think about some of the sites you use daily. Why do you use them? Why are there some you go back to only when you run into your bookmark for them by accident? Don't those sites have good, informative and worthwhile content? In many cases, I'd bet your once-in-a-blue-moon sites have better content than your daily sites and you visit the dailies because they are fast loading and easy on the eyes to read.

Overblown, low white space, graphically appealing, slow downloading pages encourage people to say, hey wow, cool page and shower the designer with compliments. Unfortunatly, they won't be back for a month and instead visit the fast loading easy to read site down the street.

>1998, now looks kind of amateurish.

Or retro cool like Google or tech wise like AllTheWeb.

>do not feel like buying.

Jazz it up, but do it in a very subtle manner so that the main focus of the page remains on the content or purpose of the page. Everything else on the page takes away from that purpose. Use some very fine graphics to emphasize certain points and draw their eye next to the page 'money' points. You can do a lot with simple colored text, or tables that break up the page into logical 'boxes' or as I call them to click or not to click decision points.