Design your website so it is very easy to use. I can't say this enough:  My motto is to “Never make a visitor think or work.”  The moment that you make put someone into a mindset of having to figure it out where to go next, you have just lost visitors. Always keep in mind how easy it is to press that little red X in the right hand corner of the screen. You can’t make a complicated website.

Each page should show the visitor where their eye should go and what they should do next.  Keep the layout very simple.

Some webmasters think of themselves as artists and want to sell you on a really beautiful website.  Some people want to build a website that is really flashy with all kinds of things going on.  You will also see sites with a lot of columns with text and information packed in with pictures that are too big.

Well, those websites aren’t typically successful.  It’s all fluff and no content.  For instance, the websites that have a flash entrance page are more interested in an experience than actually accomplishing the goal of the website.  Whenever you are considering doing something like a flash entrance page or spending a lot of money on some type of cool animation for the site, ask yourself this:  How does it serve the purpose of the website?  Will it sell more products?  Will it help someone make a decision about our business?  Usually not.  Most often, visitors are trying to get past the very thing you are showing off or trying to figure out very quickly how to shut off that music you forced them to listen to.  (Most people will shut off the music by leaving the site.)

Also, use your cyberspace real estate wisely.  Think of your website pages as a newspaper fold.  Keep the most important things on the top half.  If you are wasting most of your top half of your page for a header and a large image, then you are most like making the visitor scroll down the page to see anything of value. 

Again: Don’t make the visitor think or work!

I always say, "Just keep your site very simple." Don’t complicate things. Even if you have a site with hundreds of pages, a visitor should never really realize that it’s that big because nobody is ever going to read hundreds of pages. That’s never going to happen.

Each visitor has a different goal in mind, and you want them to accomplish that goal. If they’re coming to your site to find out a certain information, make sure they can find it. Site navigation is extremely important.

One of the first things that you should do with your website before you design it is think about what your goals are, what you want the site to accomplish. Is it to sell things? Is it to give information? Is it a resource? What do you want to accomplish from this website?  Being clear about your goals will help you build your site.  

Keep in mind that in starting a website, it’s better to get something up and to build on that, than to just wait until you have this big, magnificent website with all the bells and whistles up.  and then you know you’re waiting a year or two years to launch it. It’s better just get a page up there. Put together some content and build on that.

The sooner you start putting content on a web page, the better.  The search engine spiders can start indexing your site.  It is also to your advantage to have your content change.  So putting up a new site a page at a time is quite acceptable.  You can always do a “grand opening” when it is finished. 

You may want to get just a few pages online while the entire site is being built.  Have a “sneak peek” of the upcoming website and your contact information.  Then if you have delays in the launch of your new website, then you are spending time with content on your domain.  This will help with the search engines.  The longer you have content on the website, the better you will do when it comes to search results. 

Also, even though your website is not complete, at least potential customers or clients may still contact you.  If you have no web page up, they are not contacting you.