Designing successful Web sites

Rough Notes, May 2001 by Ashenhurst, John

10) Don't provide links to unfinished parts of your site, providing an "under construction" message when the visitor gets there. The visitor doesn't want to know about what you intend to do sometime in the future. They're in your site right now. They want to know what you have right now and how to find it.

If you're so inclined, take a look at Jakob Nielsen's book. It's sobering, dense and fascinating. Good Web sites can be enormously useful to an agency. But they don't happen by accident. They require a great deal of thinking, research, experimentation, and evolution. Nielsen can be one of your guides.

The author

John Ashenhurst is president of Sound Internet Strategy, publisher of "Sounding Line," a monthly newsletter that focuses on insurance and the Internet. Ashenhurst has created and written about insurance technology since 1975. For more information, visit the "Sounding Line" Web site (www.soundingline.com).