But while sophisticated and eye-catchy design took over Cyber Route 66, technology brought along plenty of new bells and whistles to replace the screaming bullets and rotating icons. Those bells and whistles - Flash design and the like - are attractive, no argument there, and have brought Web design to a new level of information diffusion. Yet some Web designers advise their clients to steer clear of some of those techniques. Flashy graphics, while fun to see and helpful for some sites, are not very friendly for others.

“Flash tends to slow things down,” says Susan Sanders-Kinzel with Port Orchard-based Cumuli Design (www.cumuli.com), whose clients include the South Kitsap Business Networking, Cascadia Addiction Treatment Services, and Larry Wright's Classical Gas Motors. “Our style is to keep things as simple as we can. The quicker people can get to information they want, the better.”

That doesn't mean Cumuli doesn't do Flash, Sanders-Kinzel said. Some clients really prefer it, or have a site that justifies its use.

For most small businesses, however, more is not necessarily better. With literally millions of choices of Web sites, consumers don't care to wait around for a site to finish loading, and the more graphics, Flash and other gizmos the site has, the longer people will tap their fingers waiting - and the faster they'll say “adios” and move on to a potential competitor.

So if you don't use bells and whistles to impress online visitors, what can you do? Simple: Give them something useful like fresh content, says Sheila Broumley with Bremerton-based Wave of the Future (www.ridinthewave.com), whose Web design clients include Harrison Hospital, the Home Builders' Association of Kitsap County and AMI International. Providing content not only will bring clients back but will also help with search engine placement, she says, because search engines are getting more sophisticated in how they rank sites. Some engines are now ignoring the so-called meta-tags, the invisible areas that contain key words, site description etc.

“The only money that bells and whistles make is for the designers, and it doesn't help the business owner,” Broumley says. “Think of yourself as a customer…and come up with a strategy, then bring the designer on board.”

While it may be tempting to engage a designer in a consultation to get recommendations, no one knows the business best than the staff and managers - Broumley recommends instead of paying a designer to sit through meetings, have internal meetings first, come up with some suggestions, then let the designers use their skills to arrange the information in the best way. And instead of focusing on hot visuals, think of useful information that best suits the business, whether it's recipes or sewing tips.

Keeping the site current, however, presents another challenge: updates. Some designers offer to set up a simple user interface so that the company can update its own site with new text and images, and others offer reasonable fees for making updates.

While Website trends and tastes vary, one thing is certain: Almost everyone is traveling cyberspace now, and sometimes the difference between a good site and a bad one - or worse, no site at all - could mean lost business.