Basics of good site design

• Put your company’s logo on every page, in the same location. When the user clicks on your logo, it should always return them to your home page. If you don’t have a logo, you should think very seriously about having one professionally designed to fit the unique identity that you desire for your company.
• Make it very evident - especially on your home page - what you are offering on your site. If a visitor has to think too hard about it during those first few valuable seconds, they will go elsewhere.
• Keep it Simple! While Flash, Javascript and sound files might seem really cool, they slow down page load time and often annoy visitors instead of impressing them. Just because you CAN does not mean you SHOULD!
• ALT tags for images should be present and descriptive. This is useful for those who don’t load the images and also for search engines, since they can’t “see” images but do read the ALT tags.
• The Home Page should have an easily accessible link to a site map page which will include a list with links to all the pages from your website – this is useful for both visitors AND search engines (when it follows the link for your site map, it will be able to easily find all your site’s pages).
• User-friendly navigation is essential. If a visitor can’t easily get where they need to be, they will get frustrated and leave.
• Use descriptive page titles. Titles are important because many search engines use those when generating links to your pages as a result of a user’s search. Additionally, when a user bookmarks a page, the title is listed for that bookmark…if it is not meaningful, it will likely remain unused or be deleted.
• Consistent use of colors for links throughout all pages is important so you don't confuse your visitor.
• Keep length of text content per page at a reasonable length, no more than half the length you would use in print. Since people tend to scan, rather than read webpages, use headlines, bullets, whitespace and bolded words to break the monotony and catch your visitor’s eye.
• Select a few important keywords and keyphrases per page and feature them in the title, meta-tags, ALT tags, and body of the page. Be sure to use keyphrases in H1 or other heading tags, which are weighted as more important by search engines. This can help the search engines determine what your page is all about.
• Don’t use frames – search engines are not very successful in reading frame pages.
• Use custom error pages that display when the URL is typed incorrectly or the file does not exist. The preference here is to use a pseudo-site map page so the visitor can find what they were looking for instead of going elsewhere.
• Proof-read – spelling and grammatical errors damage the credibility of your site.
• Only design and maintain your own website if you can make it look professional. Nothing turns off a visitor more than a homemade-looking website, because it implies that other areas of your business are unprofessional as well.