By creating a separate website at gretschcustomshop.com.au, they’re able to showcase the unique, top-shelf qualities of these instruments and give visitors the impression they’re seeing experiencing special.

The website is built “by hand”. A designer has to adjust the home page photos every time a new model is released. In the long run it would be cheaper to build this site in a content management system (CMS). However sometimes a quality, hand-made product does require a quality, hand-made website.

Prussia.Net has just completed a website for Jane Simons exercise, with design by Debra Jason. The site features samples from Jane’s DVDs (created using Flash Video), and everything-on-one-page details of her three exercise classes.

Netcraft’s latest survey found 101,435,253 websites in November 2006. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen says users now have firm expectations for how a website should work.

“Users’ basic expectations have settled and you should design accordingly, unless you have something that’s substantially better,” says Nielsen. “A small improvement won’t work if it requires an unconventional interaction style.”

Nielsen says you should design a website to work the way users expect things to work. Don’t create an interface that works in an unexpected way.

“Such interfaces serve only to chase users away,” he warns. “The Web is no longer a marvel of innovation, it’s an everyday tool, and you differentiate yourself by providing both better content and better solutions to users’ problems.”