There are a few things you will never get if I work on your website. I promise that you will not have a flash-only website that forces the browser to be the same size as the screen (if I wanted it that big I would have made the browser that big, thanks) and play loud music you can’t turn off with canned sound effects when you move your mouse. No hidden navigation that users have to “discover”. No flash-only “I didn’t want search engines to be able to index my site anyway” crap.

Yes, some of those sites are pretty. Very well executed, very artistic. Props to the artists involved. But a web presence it is NOT. Users should be able to tell at a second’s notice what they’re supposed to do on the site, how to get where they want to go and most importantly, what you do. Search engines need text, TEXT, for their spiders to index or you can kiss any kind of placement in search results goodbye. And finally, stop ticking your users off! If I want sound, give me a button that says “turn sound on”, don’t start playing it immediately. Stop resizing my browser. Stop playing movies and flash immediately on page load. Give me a button that says “Play Movie”.

This is not rocket science. Don’t screw with your user; don’t lock out every search engine on the planet.