But guess what- the playing field has just been leveled...

With a full color, well-designed web site now the backyard breeder can portray the same level of quality and professionalism as anyone else. Without heavy ad production fees and without re-submitting a new ad each month to keep in front of the public's eye. No deadlines, no word limits -  available to the whole world -  24 hours a day.

Think clean. Think classy. Think professional.

• Yard Sale.  Cutesy clip art, unicorns and rainbows, the same animation you've already seen at ten other sites, multi-colored backgrounds with numerous different colors and sizes of fonts, pictures that sprawl all over the place, too many pictures to a page... basically, pink flamingos in the yard. While this might work on a pre-teens gaming page, it has little value in the multi-billion dollar a year equestrian business. It's busy, it's confusing, it's... ugly. Think of it like this: if this was your breed journal ad- you'd never put that in it. It doesn't work any better on the internet.
  
  
• Fonts The Size Of Cats. Fonts you can see on your 14" monitor from outside the house through the lace curtains. They take up real estate and put too much distance between content. Again... ugly.
  
  
• Pages That Don't Fit. While some are lucky enough to own a 21" monitor, the sad fact is most people do not. Scrolling 6" to the end of the screen is annoying, and makes a site very disjointed for the viewer.
  
  
• Big Horse - Small Site. It's a downright tragedy that some of the same people that spend thousands and thousands of dollars a year on advertising a big ticket horse only to join the race to the internet with a site that does not reflect their standard of excellence.
  
  
• Time For The Eye Doctor. Background images in colors five shades outside of what is found in nature. Blue amoebas, red rage, orange crush, chartreuse squiggles, pink paisley, etc. These backgrounds look like a visit to a Chinese restaurant on an acid trip.  There hasn't been a color of text yet that you can read over these with. Could cause a seizure under the right circumstances.
  
  
• What I Did On My Summer Vacation. Too much free time and Front Page can be a dangerous combination in the wrong hands. Even though the mechanics may seem simple, it's the final product that counts. Just as people pay for 'shank power' at the World show, sometimes things are best left to professionals. Again- it's all presentation.
  
  
• Special Effects That Aren't Very Special. Can anyone tell me what's the intrigue of a flashing 3-D text logo, or did I sleep through that meeting? After the first two or three blinks, what then?  It's like the refrigerator light- will it still be on when I go to bed? Will it blink if I visit again? Was the load time worth it? Would something else have worked better?
  
  
• The Mask Of Zorro. Bad masking jobs. There's a bit more to image retouching than plunking down $550 for a box of Photoshop. Some horses look like they were cut out of the background with a dull knife. Not professional. Not pretty. Not classy.
  
  
• Design That Isn't. Scanning a full page ad and calling it a web site. No- that's a  webpage, if you will. Charging anything more than a 'per scan' charge is practically theft.
  
  
• Copycat Copycat.  There is a significant, if not legal, difference between inspiration and imitation. When one designer has a hit with a layout or scheme, it seems it begins to pop up everywhere. What's worse, many of the 'violators' are using other people's ideas, images, and text and marketing it as their own in order to compete against the same person they 'borrowed' from. These are probably the same people who always 'traced' instead of sketched in elementary school. Put them in a room with ten monkeys for a million years working at a computer 24 hours a day.. they'd just steal from the monkeys.
  
  
• Fat Horse Graphics R Us. One or two high quality images take a significant amount of download time. They'd better be worth the wait. Most are not. Several sites have six -   seven -  even ten or more per page, taking in excess of two minutes to fully load. Discretion is the better part of artwork. Breaking up content is another solution.
  
  
• Decompression Chamber. Seems some people are scared to death the internet police might red flag their site if they don't compress their graphics enough. While sophisticated compression techniques are used to reduce an image's file size, some go way overboard and present an image of a horse that looks like he was stoned to death before he was pulled in ten different directions. Don't compromise the very asset you are presenting to make some un-horsey critic happy.  In this business- they have to look gooood. Be reasonable - don't be piggish - but don't sell out, either.