And now, my Top Ten Krystal Kleen Karpet Kare homepages:

10. Shane McDougal, TGWD
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Shane gave us a home page that has nice, big buttons on it that are easy to read and easy to decipher. Unfortunately, the specials listed on the right give the appearance of another menu and are frustrating when one tries to click.

9. Kim Coulter, Artisticaspects.com
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Kim kept it all on one page, which I admire. However, this page also suffers from a menu overload. There are the big buttons on the left, the links on the right, and up above is a list of services that is not clickable and, sadly, doesn't quite line up.

8. Jeff Walters, Wild-Webs
Visit the Entry Jeff's buttons also suffer from design-over-
readability, but I really like the "sweep" of the menu. That makes me think of cleaning up.

7. Bruce Colgan, Interteq
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Bruce picked the carpeting theme as his background. Of all the pages submitted, this one works best on a 14" monitor set at 640 x 480. Because the buttons were a little bit fuzzy on that carpet background, and the dead block of text is used as the central focus, this site didn't make the top end of the winners.

6. Jason Schubring
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Roughly the same concept as Bruce's above, but Jason gave us a cleaner look. This one would have been closer to the top of the list if the color contrast had been better on the buttons. Black lettering on a dark blue background are just a tad hard to read. A little more tightening and this would have fit without scrolling as well. However, there's no wandering about looking for click spots. Jason gave us a design that is very easy to interpret.

All of the above sites suffered from wordiness. Designers need to refrain from telling the whole story on the home page--the goal of the home page is to let people know what you do for a living and allow them to zero in on things of interest. Blocks of text turn people off. People scan, they don't read.

Sites in the next group each get special attention. These folks know what they're doing and they do it well.

5. Ran Mullins, Metaphor Studio
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Ran gave us a simple, clean design with a menu about the customer. This is such an important issue. Most people are not fascinated by the history of your company. They want to know how to get the stains out of their carpet. They want to know about carpet-cleaning, flood-damage restoration, upholstery cleaning, spot dyeing and all the rest. These are buttons that relate to what the customer wants to accomplish. Hats off.

4. Dylan Bennett, Theta Business Solutions
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Dylan gave his site design the human touch--there's a picture of Mark McNutt himself looking cheerful, capable, and proud of running an award-winning company. The thousand words this picture tells are all about the company being a warm, friendly place to do business. The menu is simple, the screen fits on a small terminal, and the text is short enough that one is actually interested in reading it. Too bad Dylan choose to go with frames.

3. David Winegar from Helsinki, Finland, http://www.davidwinegar.com/
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David's design has a great deal going for it. The drawing of the truck tells us Krystal Kleen is fast, but good-natured at the same time. The font design is wonderful, the menus are brief and the carpet background doesn't get in the way of navigation. Unfortunately, David used DHTML to launch a new window which pops up without the browsers navigation buttons. You can't go "Back". Darn.

2. Mark Fassbender, Leisure, Inc.
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Mark's work is very impressive because of how straightforward it is. Proof that you don't have to be a world-class graphic artist from Helsinki to create a usable, friendly Web site. Yes, I took off points for the list of services being non-clickable. But Mark made up for that with an easy-to-read design that included text link labels under his buttons and meta tags. Including keywords and a site description shows Mark to be a holistic site designer. He's not just focused on how it looks and how it works, but how people are going to find it. Well done.

Finally--My Winner!:

1. Mitchel Wilkerson
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Using JavaScript instead of Java or Flash or plug-ins, Mitchel created the cleanest, most attractive site of the bunch. Did he get a perfect score? Nope. Meta tags would have helped, as would cutting down the width of the bottom blue bar that doubles the width of the page. Other than that, the red highlight for cursor placement notification is beautiful, the 3-D graphic effect is wonderful, and page is devoid of added extras. I have no trouble figuring out what this site has in store for me and it is simply a pleasure to look at. Thanks, Mitchel. Nicely done.

Lessons Learned:

• Keep it simple
• Don't let technology carry you away
• Keep it simple
• Don't confuse your need to tell with the customers' need to learn
• Keep it simple
• Great artistic talent isn't necessary but it sure helps
• Keep it simple
• Don't forget your meta tags
• Keep it simple

Remember, the Web is the place where anybody can express their talent and their opinions. If you're going to express yours, be prepared for some criticism. My thanks to Mark McNutt for using the Web as it was intended--a place where ideas can be exchanged.