I certainly didn't mean to offend you, hon!  If you don't charge the girls for that, wonderful!  I still don't like anything that slows down my getting to the important info, but I do appreciate your efforts.

I have, however, seen quite a few girls (and heard of many more) that fell for that "I can do this magical opening page in Flash that will really drag in the visitors to your site!" line from the web site designer, only to find that it costs 3 or 4 times as much to develop and maintain the site.

I can't speak for others, but I can say that I get my best information verbally, which includes the written word, rather than visually from graphics.  I want to see what the lady says about herself in her self-description/bio/etc., rather than guessing at her personality from what backgrounder graphics she uses.  Mixing that written info with her pictures, and most ecpecially our exchanges of email and/or phone conversations, I can figure out whether we're likely to hit it off.

All that said, it is after all the lady's site, and she should put her stamp on it.  All I ask is that web designers keep in mind some cardinal rules:

1) What would Joe Dialup do?  That stuff that looks great running instantaniously on the machine you're using for development can really suck on an old 486 laptop with insufficient memory and a 56K modem connection.

2) Follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)

3) Never use graphics where text would do.  Fancy fonts are nice, but not where it requires most or all text on a page to be embedded in graphics just to use the font.

4) Remember the purpose of the site.  Most provider sites are not the kind that people stumble on - they're looked up in search engines and sites like this board.  So the site doesn't need a front page that drags in people that stumble on it, it needs a front page that identifies the type of site (to let the cyber-nanny stuff do its job) and can be quickly be perused and passed to get to the meat of the site.