1) Do not use Splash Pages – Splash pages are the first pages you see when you land at a website. They normally have a very striking image or short video with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. They are just eye checking pages that can hurt your search engine ratings. Your visitors can become bored with these pages and click away from them to maybe another website. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click to another website. Impress them with your valuable content not something they do not care about.

2) Do not use Excessive Banner Advertisements -  Anyone who has surfed the internet has trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements. Do not waste valuable website real estate with these distracting ads. Instead, provide more valuable content and embed relevant affiliate links into your content. Let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a Simple and Clear Navigation -  You need to have a simple and straightforward navigation menu. Make it so that even a young child will know how to use it. Provide a link back to the previous page at the end of each screen. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will click away from your site.

4) Have a Clear Indication of Where the User is -  When visitors are engrossed in browsing your site they may get lost in your links. Make sure they know which part of the site they are in at any time. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of your site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means clicking away from the website.

5) Avoid Using Audio on Your Site – When your visitors are browsing your site for any length of time, the last thing they need is some audio playing over and over. Many of your visitors will want to be uninterrupted while taking in the knowledge your website displays. Should you feel complied to have audio, make sure you provide your visitors with the ability to control the sound. Provide a volume or a mute control for them to use.

You can follow these five easy guidelines to have the kind of website that will keep visitors and not send them away. Now go and put them to use.

The major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites for listing on their search result pages. They use these crawlers as a means of providing up-to-date data. They follow links to a page, read the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

Frames are something to be avoided on your website if you want to make your site indexed easily. Using frames can prevent search engines from finding pages within a website or cause the search engine to send visitors into a site without the proper frame “context” being established. Frames tend to only confuse search engine robots causing them to abandon your site. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Since crawler-based search engines were primarily designed to index HTML text, web sites built with Flash may be difficult or impossible for crawlers to read. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Meta tags are used to help some search engines index your page, especially if your page has frames. Meta tags should be placed between the and tags of your document. Use meta tags on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it.

Stop using wrong HTML tags like “font” to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. Using CSS, you will eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

The search engines will generate more traffic to your website. All you need to do is make your web pages search engine friendly. Follow the guide and you will see more traffic.

Websites are the in thing these days.  Everyone and their mother has a website, it can be in fashion, sports, or something like that. Websites have become a necessity to almost everyone. Companies, businesses, individuals, even young adults have created personal websites for profit, or for entertainment.

Now that you are determined to build a website, and I knew you would, there are harder considerations to think about. You should be consider several factor before creating a website. These factors are cost, maintenance, use, web host, and driving people to it.

First you should consider the cost. You must always try to find an affordable host which has a very good up time.  It does you no good the have a cheap host if they are down a lot of time. People will become frustrated with your site and just not visit it.  Still you need a to look for a reliability rate. There are a lot of cases where the web hosts has not provided the service they had said they do. Some have even shut down and were nowhere to be seen. Keep this in mind. GoDaddy and 1and1 are two very good host. Do a search for ‘web hosting’ and see what comes up.

Your next consideration is, would hiring a professional be affordable? Is it the best option? For simple websites, you can always look for a free code, or even use a free programs.  You can even modify your free code with your free program.  I like free. If you have read my other blogs on creating a web site you will see I very much into open source.

Now, when it comes to more complex coding, and when you want it to do more than just providing information, hiring help in doing so may be the best way to save time. Not only in terms of design, but security is also a key consideration in assuring a quality website. If the website also acts as a portal for businesses, security would definitely be the issue here.

After you have decides that you need a website and will build it you will need to know how to drive people to it.  Man if I could tell you in one easy paragraph, I would be a genius.  To find that out you will need to look at my web page for Traffic and Search Engine Optimization. I have a great section on it.

This should have provide you with a good place to start.  For more information check out both my website pages and blogs.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you want to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accommodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking for further information.

When you have a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit right away!

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

In those days the Internet had just enough speed and just enough processing power, so only the real mavericks could make a complex, flashy webpage and have it work.

Nowadays, simple Web design is the end all and be all among many web professionals. People are getting sick of excessively elaborate, difficult to navigate websites. You can go to my web page and look at how I organized the information on it.

Don’t get me wrong – they have their place. Still, among business clients especially, having simple, elegant, and to the point website is viewed as the best way to go nowadays.

One of the reasons behind this is because simple Web design has become easier than ever for your average laymen to do. There are many FREE easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) web page editor.  I personally like kompozer.

Although Web developers still build the best web pages, there are many pre-existing build your own website templates that can make the process quite easy. With a simple web design program, you can build a storefront, give out information about your business or organization, provide links, and do everything else that you want on the Internet – all while maintaining a professional appearance.

Of course, even if you want simple web designs, you still might consider hiring a professional. Even a simple web page will benefit from the stylistic flourishes that a professional designer can give it. Like in any other business, professionals still get better results than amateurs.

Many web programmers contract on a per project basis, so if you have a simple Web design in mind it can be particularly affordable. They will work with you to implement a project, following your design ideas and suggesting improvements when they see them. Go and compare the different companies on the web like www.Hire-A-Designer.com or www.project4hire.com or any other you may find.

Not every application demands simple webpages. If you run a special effects studio, a design firm, or some other highly artistic practice, you might want to go for flash instead of minimalism. As long as you can make it looks slick. It can be a great idea to take advantage of the high speed of the modern Internet to make your graphics really pop.

You might want to play around a bit with different ideas before you hire a professional. Sometimes, this is the best way to figure out what you really need to meet your requirements. Remember a simple Web design can be the best design.