For an online business to be successful it needs visitors.

A website without visitors is like sun tan lotion on a wet weekend in Skegness. Pointless.

But all the visitors in the world won’t translate into money in your pocket if your site looks like a dog’s dinner.

I was surfing the internet last night, looking for some information on a breed of dog, and hit upon what should have been the perfect site via a search engine. How wrong could I be.

For starters, no sooner had the homepage started to load and the song Who Let The Dogs Out? came blasting out of my computer speakers. Not ideal at one in the morning and certainly not ideal for anyone surfing at work during a period of “downtime”.

Shock over, I turned off my speakers and started to scroll down the homepage in search of what I was looking for. I use the word started because I never got to complete my search. The website froze Firefox and that was it. I had to close Firefox down before I could regain access to the web.

I tried again with Internet Explorer - same problem. Tried it on my laptop, exactly the same.

What I did manage to see of the homepage was enough to put me off visiting the website ever again anyway. Unrelated spinning graphics and a hideous background colour (dog pooh brown) were just two of the highlights.

When you first start out creating websites, there is a real temptation to incorporate all the “tricks of the trade”, but in reality there is just no need for any bells or whistles.

Follow the old marketing maxim of KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid - and you won’t go far wrong.

Take a look at Google’s homepage for example. Could it be any more simple? Little more than a logo and a search box. In fact looking at it, they could remove the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, but who am I to argue with a billion dollar business?

And that’s just it. Billion dollar businesses like Google, like Amazon, like eBay, spend a fortune keeping things simple for their customers.

Yell.com is the latest company to see the light. It has been busily overhauling its website over recent months, adding new features including links to shopping, maps and directions, but at the same time it has been simplifying too.

On the 1st of May it unveiled its new decluttered homepage.

Here’s how it used to look:

And here’s what it looks like today:

Big big improvement eh? Although it’s not until you see both together that you realise just how complicated the old homepage was.

Here’s what Yell themselves have to say about the changes:

“The widescale homepage changes are based on analysis of site traffic and market research and offer a cleaner, more simplified approach to delivering information, recognising and playing to Yell.com’s strengths in search. The number of links present on the homepage has been significantly reduced, and the site has introduced direct stepping stones to vertical channels and non-search related content, such as advertising with Yell, maps and user registration.

“Simple icons and content summaries for each vertical channel have been introduced, incorporating increased interactivity. As users roll over each icon, the functionality of each channel is revealed – maps and directions, shopping, and food and drink.

“Should any additional channels be implemented on Yell.com the new design enables their introduction without cluttering the core proposition of business search. Each vertical channel will benefit from a separate look and feel so users can rapidly understand and action the individual propositions when appropriate.”

I’ve no idea how much Yell spent on their analysis, research and redesign, but it would have been more than I’ll probably spend in a lifetime on such things.

But that doesn’t stop me learning from the big boys with the deep pockets.