Basic Tips for Designing Your Own Web Site.

Before you draft your web pages, you need to think about what exactly your business is about and what you would like your web presence to achieve. This will help you determine content and layout of your web site.

Basic "Do's."

• Design an easy-to-use and logical navigation menu.
• Include a search engine.
• If selling anything online, be sure to use a secure shopping cart feature. (Related link: How can I process credit card orders?)
• Include meaningful content (not only will this translate into visitors staying on your site, but it will aide your search engine results.)
• Include a policies page (see our "Making it Legal" section)
• Keep your links and content relevant to your business.
• Provide contact information.
• Keep your images down to less than 10,000 KB (many folks are still using dialup and will not wait for your page to load due to large image files or other large files)

WELCOME TO MY TOTALLY AWESOME WEB PAGE

Basic "Don'ts."

• Don't use colored backgrounds if you are going to have a lot of images (such as products for sale) if you can't get the images to seamlessly blend in (see the awful example immediately above).
• A true sign of an amateur web site is one that contains all sorts of flashy, animated gifs. See the examples above.
• Music, recorded speech and other sounds are aggravating. If you must have sound, provide a "turn off the sound" option for your web visitors.
• Frames are a total waste of time and wreck your chances of good search engine results.
• Adding cheap flash introductions does not make your web site "cool."
• Inconsistent fonts and text color that you can barely read make your site look trashy (see the above examples).
• Banner farms and tons of affiliate links that have nothing to do with your business will not magically make you a ton of cash.
• Using "hidden" keywords (i.e., white text on a white background) and hidden doorway pages may have worked once upon a time for search engine relevancy, but don't do it now -- unless you want your page banned from the search engines.
• Don't steal other people's copyrighted material or images. You can generally quote others' material as long as you properly reference and link the source or obtain permission. Fair Use copyright information can be found at Cornell University.