Many businesses fall into a simple trap on their websites: they load up the front page with paragraphs and paragraphs of information important to the company. “What’s wrong with that?”, you might ask. Simply put: your visitors don’t care.

Reprinted with permission under the CC-BY-NC license from http://xkcd.com/773/

Your front page should focus on what’s most important to your site’s visitors, not what’s important to you. Get rid of the splash page of friendly, smiling stock photos. Get rid of the paragraphs of “About” text that no one will read past the first sentence (yes, your story is compelling; you can tell it to your customer in person after you’ve delivered a quality product/service).

Give your website a purpose. Give customers a reason to visit it, and help them find it immediately when they arrive.

Google is officially ending support for Internet Explorer 6 in Google Apps. This affects users of Google Docs and Google Sites beginning March 1, 2010, and will affect users of Google Mail and Google Calendar later this year.

This is a welcome change. Providing support for a decade old web browser is severely limiting what we can do on the web and driving up development costs unnecessarily. Hopefully this move by a major player such as Google will goad enough people to upgrade that we can finally leave IE6 behind us.

In the meantime, if you haven’t upgraded you browser recently, perhaps it’s time you do so now. You can upgrade Internet Explorer to version 8, or try another browser, such as Firefox or Chrome.