Hello everyone, I'm a new member to WHT.

I was wondering if a very simple, clean, and fast loading website is enough for costumers to buy from you. On my company website, I would prefer to not have many graphics, just the information, and something that doesn't take 20+ seconds to load.

I have also thought about buying a template (the ones with "pretty graphics" and such), is pretty graphics really nessecary to draw customers in?

Thanks for your time, and opinions.

While your site is the first impression you give your customers, I believe smart people won't be fooled by designs.

Of course, please don't use plain black and white pages without any tables/layers etc.

Clean and simple designs does not need to be ugly and unprofessional. There are plenty which still looks great.

I agree with freak.

Although a good first impression is a plus, I don't think its everything. Your reputation and your service is certainly more important.

Actually tables play a very big part in the design of my website :). But my pages do have a white background, with black text. Im trying to make it as professional, and clean as I can.
I think this could be my biggest challenge to starting my hosting business.

Thanks for the quick reply freak.

If you're looking for a speedy load, then I hope those tables on your site are being used for tabular data. Otherwise, all they're doing is slowing you down.

Absolutely - simple design can be extraordinarily effective. My highest traffic site loads in less than 10 seconds on a 14.4 modem. There are a lot of ways this sort of design can be done effectively. As one can imagine, there are a lot of ways in which this is very restrictive, but certainly it can be done very well. In the end, content will reign supreme every time.