I'm going to be redesigning some web pages for a friend. The one he had before is kaput right now, but it was busy and full of stuff that made it difficult to update or change.

Periodically I survey the literature, as it were, to see what people are doing. Last spring I took a refresher web design course (it turned out to be too simple, but I was just looking to see if there were any new trends they wanted to mention). It seems that what was old is new again--tables are back. Frames and some of the high-octane javascript pages are out of favor when compared to simple, malleable tables.

My own pages at work are that way, but I'm not selling anything (except higher education, but that's a different subject). My friend offers tours and a book for sale. I'm going to trim down some of the verbiage, or maybe just provide hot spots where a mouse-over will bring up alt text with each testimonial he wants to run. He has way too many of them--yards and yards of them. People aren't going to read beyond the first screen, so there is a lot of convincing that goes along with the redesign.

Have you noticed any good looking simply-designed pages lately? Will you provide a link to them so we can take a look and possibly discuss the pros and cons here? The test may well be in the source code, but all suggestions will be welcome, especially from folks who have been doing enough web design to have formed some opinions about what makes for a good commercial web page.

Thanks!

SRS