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i have been chatting with a couple of website designers in the last month about doing the graphics on my first paysite and i wanted to know if you think a design with a lot of graphics is really needed or if i can just make a reglar paysite design using html code like the butchdixon.com site?
Not at all, in fact, you dont even have to get as fancy as the site you mentioned if you dont want to for example, http://www.athleticstuds.com has made a few sales since it went live a week or two back and im sure most would agree there is nothing 'fancy' about that layout whatsoever, all it does is showcase the content, nothing more, nothing less.
Regards,
Lee
I actually believe that fancy graphics are something of an detriment to user experience on a website. Too often "slickness" replaces "usability" as a design consideration. And when the user starts to be overwhelmed with flashing icons and things grabbing their attention on the screen, the designers respond by adding more and more "join now!" links all over the place. The design rapidly devolves into a competing mess of graphics all trying to grab your attention.
Here's the advantage of html (or better yet, php-html) designs: They're far, far easier to keep current. There's nothing better for users than to look at the tour of a website only to see, "latest updates" with dates next to them. It shows users not only what they're likely to find on the website, but establishes credibility that the website is updated.
Heavy graphic websites often show pictures of hot guys and make elaborate promises, but are low on the more credible specifics. Claims like, "over 50,000 pictures inside!" are fairly meaningless. We have all seen padded photo sets that put in all 300 pictures in the set, even the bad ones that should have been edited out. It's far more effective to say, "over 200 photo sets inside" and to let people check out thumbs and/or samples from your latest photo sets.
Personally, I like the Sean Cody website. Very simple yet extremely effective. I have striven to go for something of a simple approach to website on my site at GayGeek as well.
HTML/PHP promotional pages also have the advantage of being easier to tweak as needed. Heavy graphical interfaces can require you get in a designer to fix.
--Aaron