has anyone here ever sat in on testing sessions? I have and it forever changed the way i designed sites, it really rammed home to me how little people care about extraneous content. Most people pay little or no attention to imagery, if the link they want is visible they click it, i have never seen anyone wait for a whole page to load... people always skip intros and if a site takes more than 20/30 seconds to load (and i'm talking about a page with nothing but a preloader on it) they leave or, if they have to view the site, they become very annoyed and ask why they have to sit there with no content.

i think it's hard for some designers to overcome their egos, to honestly think about what the user wants rather than what they want.