Top Ten Website Tips

1. Make sure each website page has something interesting or valuable to offer.

     Content is actually much more important than design, which is why it is the #1 tip.Many people are trying to make useless pages look great because they believe that style is all that really matters. But you need to appreciate that, fundamentally, a web page exists to provide something that's useful or interesting to visitors. If your page doesn't have that, then you must fix that problem before you worry about how to present it.Think about what you are offering your visitors? Why should they visit your site? You need to focus on that question before you worry about the look of the website.
If your plan is to make money from advertising, then aim for a ratio of not less than 75% editorial to 25% advertising.

Amazingly there are some sites that are almost nothing but adverts. You know that no one would turn on the TV if it were just commercials with no programs. And no one would buy a magazine if it were just ads and no articles. So a website also has to have a lot more content than ads if it is to be successful.

2. Don't distract your visitors with blinking or scrolling text, animated GIFs, or auto-loading sound.

Animation and sounds are distracting. How can you concentrate on reading the content of a website when there are things flying around the page? It's like trying to read a newspaper when shaking it repeatedly. And visitors with slow connections will resent that you wasted their time by forcing them to load animations and sound files.

Previous conventional wisdom was that people will be drawn to an animated ad, but it's actually the opposite. Readers who are assaulted by blinking ads are more likely to leave the site immediately without clicking on anything and are far less likely to bookmark the site, return to it, link to it, and recommend it. That's why research shows that animated banner ads are no more effective than static ads.

Another problem with scrolling text is that the reader can't read it at their own pace. They are forced to read it at whatever speed the website delivers it. I am sure they would prefer to read those two sentences quickly and then move on, but because it's scrolling they have to sit there and wait for the text to slowly appear.
This brings up an important point - always keep your visitors' interests in mind. Make sure you try to please them, not yourself. Scrolling text does nothing to serve the visitor. If it's on a site it's because the site owner thought, "Let me show how cool I am." Do you see the difference? Don't design the site for yourself, design it for the people who will actually use it.

3. Don't annoy your visitors with pop-up windows.

Nobody likes pop-ups. Here again, the only reason a site would have pop-ups is because the site owner is thinking of his/her own interests rather than the readers. We all know that when we're browsing, we hate pop-ups, but suddenly when we switch hats and become the webmaster, we lose our ability to see through the users' eyes. So remember to put ourselves in their shoes. Which of these reactions to pop-ups is a visitor is more likely to have?
(a) "A pop-up window, oh goody! I love sites with pop-ups! I will make certain to bookmark this site and visit often. I will also certainly click the ad or links in the pop-up because I love them so much."
(b) "@#&$! Whoever made this website obviously has no respect for me as a visitor. I’m out of here now and I will never come back."

4. Put some thought into organisation of your content.

Think about what content you have and how it should be organised. This is at least as important as what your pages look like, so actually spend some time on it. You do your readers a disservice if they can't easily find what they're looking when everything is thrown on your site in a haphazard fashion.

5. Minimize clicking!

Put as few clicks between your visitor and your information as possible – a maximum of three is recommended. The more you force your visitors to click to get the information they want, the more likely they will abandon it.
Is your home page a splash page (a page with no meaningful information on it, that simply "welcomes" visitors to the site, along with an "Enter Site" link)? 
If so, get rid of it. After someone takes the effort to visit your website, allow them to access it right away! Don't make them knock on two different doors.
A related idea is to put meaningful amounts of information on each page.

If a page doesn't have at least 400 words, you probably should combine that page with another short page.
Along with minimizing clicking, minimize scrolling, too.

6. Include a way to get back to the home page, on every page.

When users get lost they like to start over from square one. Make it easy for them to do so. If you're including a clickable logo on the top of every page, make sure to also include text that says something like "Home", because some users don't realize that logos take you back to the home page.

Also remember that users might not be able to hit the "Back" button to go back to your home page, because they might have entered the middle of your site after clicking a link to it from a search engine or from some other site.

7. Include a menu on every page.

While you should provide a way for users to get back to your home page quickly, you shouldn't force them to go home before they can go somewhere else. Include a menu on the left or the top of each page.

Don't put navigation links only at the bottom of pages, because then users will have to scroll down to the bottom to get to them (unless your pages are very short). Users clearly dislike links at the bottom of long pages. On long pages, you'll want navigation elements on BOTH the bottom and the top or left, so that users who have read a lengthy page don't have to scroll back up to get to the menus.

8. Don't use frames.

You might be tempted to use frames because it makes it easy to have the same header or menus appear throughout the site. And usability studies do show that users find sites with frames "Easy to Comprehend", "Easy to Navigate", and "Easy to Find Info". But there are two serious downsides to frames: First, the address bar doesn't change as you go from page to page.

That makes it impossible for anyone to bookmark or link to a specific page in your site, or to share that page with a friend by emailing them the link. Second, when a page within your site other than the frameset shows up in a search engine, a visitor clicking over to that page will see just that subpage without the surrounding frame.

9. Don’t have a slow loading websites.

Nothing is more annoying to readers than waiting for a 200k graphic to load. The maximum size of any graphic on a website is 15k. Graphics software can compress files so they take up less room on your disk, and therefore take less time to load into your visitors' browsers.

And as mentioned earlier, don't slow your site down with auto-playing sound files, either.

10. Use contrasting colours or simple backgrounds to make your text easy to read.

It's hard to read light text on a light background, or dark text on a dark background. There are also some colour combinations that just don't work.

Also, it's hard to read text on background images that have a wide mixture of light and dark; any background images should be simple and mostly dark or mostly light. You can improve readability of text on a background image by increasing the text size and/or making it bold.

You should almost never put text on an image or textured background. Unless you really know what you're doing, such text is usually difficult or annoying to read -- if not impossible.