Your website is where your business resides -- it's the headquarters of your company! Given that, it is especially important to practice good design principles. One, you want to make sure your site reaches out to the maximum number of visitors. Two, if you sell products, you want your site to make as many sells to as many people as possible.
Make sure that the navigation on your website is clear and easy to use. The navigation menu should be uncluttered, be grouped in logical categories (logical to the user) and concise, so that visitors know how to navigate around your website without confusion or having to make too many clicks to find what they are seeking.
One thing you could consider is reducing the number of images on your website. If you have too many graphics, it can make it look cluttered and unprofessional. The graphics and photos that you use should be tasteful, add value to your image, and have a clean layout. Graphics and photos can also make your site load very slowly.
More often than not, the images on your site are probably not very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size.
Keep your text paragraphs at a shorter length than you think you need. If a paragraph is too long, try splitting it into seperate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because people don't read huge blocks of text online. They tend to skim through to find the main points and move quickly on to the next thing. Keep it simple, keep it short!
Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org and make sure your coding and scripts are cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you may lose out on a lot of prospective visitors out of frustration or annoyance.
Unless you are using them for a very functional and sound reason, try to avoid using scripting languages on your site. Use scripting languages to handle or manipulate data, not to create visual effects on your website. Heavy scripts will slow down the loading time of your site and even crash some browsers. Also, scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information.
Use CSS to style your page content - CSS stylesheets save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one place. If you want to make changes to the color, size, or type of font, or change the positioning, you only have to change it in your CSS stylesheet and the changes are applied to your whole site. Presto!
