To be an effective business site, your site must meet four criteria.

• It must be found easily by the people you want to find you
• It must meet your objectives
• It must meet the needs of target visitors
• It must work effectively

Here are the criteria for your site working well:

Your site, and especially the pages people visit for the first time need to load quickly

Your site must be easy to get around and find things in

Your site must use technology appropriately

Quick loading is probably the first real important feature on the technical aspects of a good Web site.

We have several human factor studies, going back almost 50 years, that tell me that a basic attention span for most people in North America is between 9 and 12 seconds. That's the period of time that people will wait in a void of silence before feeling compelled to speak. That's the period of time where people begin to fidget when they're asked to sit still. That's the period of time that people expect your page to load in or else they will go somewhere else.

Your basic design needs to be for you lowest-common-denominator equipment and browser. You can provide alternatives for people with upscale equipment.

The above does not mean lowest common denominator on the Web. It means lowest common denominator among your target audience. That means that a site which caters to design engineers using sophisticated equipment can expect to be able to have larger pages than a site visited by consumers, many of whom are coming from America Online.

For many consumer sites, visitors from America Online are by far the most common place where people come from. That means a slow connection and a low-end browser. If that's you, design for it.

On the other hand, Marshall Industries found that people participating in its online training programs had much faster connections and better equipment than they anticipated, and they therefore upgraded their tools to be more effective using the technological options.

Once people hit your site, the first and most important thing you need to do is establish where they are and what your value is.

You establish identity with text and graphics, but remember that most seasoned business users use the Web without loading images. That's because it's faster. They know that they can pop the images up if they need them on a particular site.

For that reason, make sure that every graphic on your has a helpful text tag to identify what it is and what its purpose is.

Establish value by solving problems or answering questions. Once you do that, people will be willing to wait longer for some of your solutions.

If the solution or answer that you intend to present requires that you slow things down, change people's frame of reference by telling them. You might say something like, "The file you requested is full of information so it's going to take a little while to load, please be patient."

Remember that your first two things once a site is up is to:

• Establish your identity
• Establish the value for them

Then, every time you're going to slow things down, change their frame of reference. Your site needs to be easy to get around on. That's what easy navigation means.

Put text tags on all your graphics.

Make sure that navigation buttons are visible from just about every place on every page on your site. You'll find that many designers prefer to put the buttons either at the bottom or at the top. I suggest that you put them in both places.

Another way to deal with this issue is to use a left-hand margin column with the key links to your site.

Click-click-click. People should be able to find what they're looking for in three clicks or less. That's a heck of a challenge sometimes for design, but it's doable.

The three click rule gets a lot easier to implement if you've already established that the entry points to your site are pages which begin with a problem, solution, or an answer to a question. If people are only coming in on a single page, which you might call the homepage, it's harder to get them where they need to go in three clicks or less.

Have a page on your site, perhaps more than one, that surveys the entire site and gives people an idea of where to go. That can take three forms:

• An entry page that describes the main sections of the site with links to them
• A site map
• A page listing, usually by category, or in some other searchable method

Keep your graphics small so loading is quick, change the frame of reference if you need to use big graphics

Using technology appropriately means that everything you do technologically on your site helps it meet your objectives. It helps your visitors find what they want and use it effectively. I firmly believe, based on my consulting and research, that business users, by and large, do not visit business Web sites to be entertained. The come for information and solutions.

Every technological feature on your site should support the functional objectives you have set. Otherwise, it's worse than a waste of money because it not only does not achieve your objectives, it may drive people away.

Wally's basic rule for page design is:

• If it blinks
• If it moves
• If it splits the screen

It needs to either have a positive function or disappear.

Animated GIF's are one of the latest design fads. Remember that anything that moves draws the eye to it and creates a sense of internal intention. If you feel you must use and animated GIF or other animation, make sure it stops moving after a couple of cycles.

The same holds for those nifty little banners that scroll along the top, bottom, and sides of pages that I visit. If they don't do something positive for you in terms of helping your visitors solve their problems or answer their questions, they are a distraction and should disappear.

With some of the new streaming technologies, audio has become feasible for some uses on Web sites. By and large, though, most folks are not going to sit transfixed in front of their computer screen listening to a two-hour speech by your CEO, no matter what your CEO thinks.

The best uses for audio that I have seen on most business sites are short greetings that establish character and personality. Longer items can be downloaded, or requested in physical (audio tape) form.

One major exception to this is if you are a professional speaker or consultant where audio is part of your actual product. In that case, longer selections may be appropriate, but you need to change the frame properly.

Video is not ready for prime time in most applications yet.

Remember that with both audio and video you are at the mercy not only of the Internet connection and its technology, but also of the equipment at the receiving end.

I suggest to clients who are thinking about lots of audio and video to do two things.

The first is to go home and compare the size of the speakers on their stereo with the size and quality of the speakers on their computer. Then, ask yourself if the people you're sending video to will have high-quality audio that they're receiving it on, or low quality. Do the same with your television and your computer monitor. What quality of vision will your people see?

The second thing I suggest that folks do is go visit a number of sites with the feature they want on it in order to see if they still want to do it later. That hardly ever happens.

Frames are a particularly nasty technological development. They split the screen and therefore provide distraction. They often also split the files so that people do not know exactly which URL they are on, or which parts of what they see will print when they select the print command.

In my years in business, I've generally discovered that frustrating people is not a good way to get them to buy from you. So, with very, very, very rare exceptions, I'd suggest that something other than frames is the appropriate way to meet your objectives.

There are two places where I have seen frames used effectively. One of them is on Newspage where the frames are used in the private area to allow scrolling of topics in the left hand column, while viewing individual stories or lists of stories in the main window. This works effectively because it, in fact, helps users use the material more easily.

Another reason that the private area of Newspage works effectively with frames is that when people select the print command, they generally know what they're getting - the main story that they're viewing on the screen. Then, the fact that they're not getting the scrolling menu on the left or the nifty banner at the top doesn't matter much.

Most of the time, I've found that the usability objectives that clients want to achieve with frames can be done with other means. If you can, I suggest you do that, since, at least in one survey, better than 80% of the people who were offered a chance to disable frames on a frame site chose the disable option.

Remember too, that if you're a site where lots of your visitors are coming from AOL, that many of them will not even be able to experience the feature.

One final point on the appropriate use of technology in design. Just as with any other area, there are certain conventions that you should only violate if you have a particular purpose for doing so, and are sure about the result that you will obtain. One of the most common failures to observe this is in setting colors for type that mimic the standard colors for links.

Most people expect something that is green or blue and underlined on a Web page to be a link. They expect something that is magenta to be a link that they've visited. I'd stay away from those colors for anything else on your site.