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Every day more horse breeders join the online community realizing the value of the internet as a marketing tool to promote stallions, services, and sell horses. Some succeed and others fail.

The downfall of many equine-related web sites can be attributed to the voracious and often elusive Killer Flamingos.

What are Killer Flamingos? Common website design mistakes and garish adornments that impede the success, usability, and presentation of hundreds of equine web sites worldwide.

Let's learn how to 1.) identify and 2.) eradicate these classic, plastic, insufferable pink flamingos from our online equine sanctuaries, and return them to the trailer parks from whence they came.

• A Virtual Yard Sale - Cutesy clip art, unicorns and rainbows, the same animation every one has 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 high profile breed journal ad - you'd never, ever include such design elements.
   
• Fonts The Size Of Cats - Text so large you can read it on your 14 inch monitor from outside the house through the lace curtains. Fonts this size take up valuable real estate and create too much distance between content areas. Again... ugly and amateurish. Sites like this surely cause Gutenburg to roll in his grave.
   
• Pages That Don't Fit - While some are lucky enough to own a 21 inch monitor, the sad fact is many people do not. Scrolling 6 inches to the end of the screen is annoying, makes a site appear disjointed, and difficult to navigate.
   
• 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 and training a big ticket horse join the race to the internet with a site that does not reflect their standard of excellence. Sloppy mask jobs and lackluster layout have no place here.
   
• 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 while tripping on acid. There hasn't been a color of text yet that you can read over these. Pages like this could cause a seizure under the right circumstances.
   
• What I Did On My Summer Vacation - Too much free time and FrontPage can be a dangerous combination in the wrong hands. Even though the mechanics of creating a web site may seem simple, it's the final product that counts. Just as people pay for 'shank power' at the World show, some things are best left to professionals. Again- it's all presentation.
   
• Special Effects That Aren't Very Special - Pray tell, what's the intrigue of a flashing 3-D text logo? What circumstances warrant the proliferation of predictable and tiresome Flash intros? After the first two or three blinks or fades, 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? Was it remotely interesting or skillful? Would something else have been more appropriate or valuable from a presentation standpoint?
   
• The Mask Of Zorro - Bad masking jobs abound both on "home made" and equine web sites created by many designers. There's a bit more to image retouching than plunking down $550 for Adobe Photoshop. Bad masking jobs make horses look like they were cut out of their original background with a dull knife. Not complimentary. Not professional. Not classy. Such efforts have no place on a quality equine web site.
   
• Design That Isn't - Scanning a full page magazine 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, Shame On Them - 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 to re-appear everywhere. What's worse, many of the 'violators' are using other people's ideas, images, and text and marketing them 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 these hacks 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 full-size images page, taking in excess of two minutes to fully load. Discretion is the better part of artwork. Breaking up content is another solution. Professionals should know the difference.
   
• 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 by wild dogs. Don't compromise the very asset you are presenting to pacify horseless web critics. In this business- the horses have to look exceptional. Don't disappoint your intended audience.
   
• Free Host Provider's Pop Up Ads - God deliver us. It is an affront to the senses to endure pop-up ads broadcasted by many of the free host providers. Be sure this also broadcasts: "We believe in our horses - but we don't believe it's worth paying to host our horse's web site. Please ignore those popup windows and enjoy your visit." Remember: anything that gives your viewers a negative experience reflects upon you and your farm. Don't ruin your first impression irritating your viewers to save a few dollars a month with a host that requires you display their popup window advertising.
   
• Parting Confirmation Shots - It's con-for-mation. Horses don't have good or bad confirmation photos. They have conformation photos. Likewise, a horse is not "out of" its sire. It is by the sire and "out of" the dam. Any one creating a web site for horsemen should know the difference. It's embarrassing how many do not. Abysmal grammar isn't any more acceptable on an equine website than anywhere else, regardless of how common it may be.
   

Contact Equine Web Design for professional equine web site development assistance, as well as makeover and consulting services for existing web sites. We'll humanely trap, remove, and release pink flamingos from your online habitat.