By: Albert Hallado

Choosing a web design sometimes can be tedious if you don't have the right resources or you simlpy don't know how. First off you need to differentiate what theme you're going to have. Is it gonna be for personal use or for business.
 
Of course you don't want to put stuff about the stock market on your personal site or Sponge Bob square pants on your business site. The layout, image, navigation and the overall look and feel should be appropriate to what your trying to accomplish. 
 
I remember when I first built my web site Man! It looked really bad and every time I looked at it it gave me a headache.  It took a lot of tweaking before it finally looked decent. One thing I noticed though was that people liked a good web design with quality content and easy navigation.
 
These two factors are very important (Good Web Design + Quality Content) you need to balance your site where your visitors get comfortable using your site.

Here's the FACTS, visitors will quickly scan your site before jumping to other information. On average, You have two seconds to catch your website visitors attention. If your site is ugly... well you do the math, your visitors will simply click the next button or close the window. This means you've just lost a potential sale and\or subscriber..

Whether you're building a website for personal use or selling digital products or just trying to build a mailing list, when you're trying to pitch your sale or just wanting to capture their email you need to have something to catch their eye.

By having a good looking website balanced with quality content and great graphics your site will stand out in a crowd.

I don't need to convince you that having a good looking site (look, feel and content) produces more visitors, sales, gets more subscribers and leads. There's just no excuse these days to have an ugly duckling website especially with the technology we have now.

Me, personally, if I go to your site and it's ugly there's no way, I mean no way I'm going to buy from you. Why? Well, your website tells me what kind of quality I'm going to get. Make sense, right?nothing personal It's just business you know.

 Below are some of the guidelines I followed while building my website:

"You're ready? OK! lets PIMP YOUR SITE A LITTLE BIT"
 
1. LOOK AND FEEL - This is very important you know what they say first impressions count! Now if your site is ugly people might not even read your content and could just simply click the back button or close the window.  It's like what I said, you need to balance your site with quality content and good graphics. Avoid using duplicate web sites or templates that everybody has.

Keep your site unique, clean, easy to read just use an everyday english most people like this way because it's more personal and more human. also don't include too much advertising.

2. COLORS - represent different meanings to people now using colors is very important too, but be very careful on this one. people react and judge on color what they see it's human nature there's something in our brain that tell us something when we see diffirent colors. that's why you often heard people asked Hey! what is your favorite colors. Personally I would only used two or three combinations of colors and it needs to match the overall look and feel of you website.

Let's say that your website's company logo or your top image is blue. You might want to stick with the colors that will match your overall look and feel. You can use red arrows or red check mark images as your bullet points and use light gray on your main navigation image. This is just an example, of course, use your own judgement. You could also use a third eye. You might want to ask your mother-in-law to take a look at your site. Oh! boy...Well that's a different story...

What I'm trying to say is if you use miltiple colors your web site will end up looking like a clown. Just imagine your self wearing a red blazer, purple pants, green tie, polka dots socks and blue shoes. Everything would be off right? Not a good sight. Also you'll want to avoid using bright or loud colors that might hurt your visitors eyes or could even give them a migrane.

3. GRAPHICS - OK! folks this is very important! Many webmasters fail on this one. Your graphics should convey your subject. If your talking about power tools in your topic you can't just use a bunch of purse and shoe images right? What you want to do is find an image of power tools or an image that relates to your topic and put it on right or left hand side of your content.

just for an example if you go to yahoo or msn and you see those thumnails graphics caption it tells you right away what it say or meant with out reading the text because the graphics convey the subject.

4. CLEAN LAYOUT DESIGN - The background of your web site is also a big part of your overall layout. As you may notice most big companies on the internet uses black text on white backgrounds. Google, Yahoo, and eBay these companies are multi-Billion Dollars companies and I bet you they can spend millions for thier site and yet they all use white backgrounds and there's a reason for that. So rule of thumb use black tex on white background.

also white backgrounds are pretty standard in web design, because it's clear, clean and easy to read. Make sure you check your site for browser compatibility and resulotions like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera and so on.. 

5. EASY NAVIGATION - Navigation  links on your site play a big role in determining the main menu of your site. You should keep your main menu together as much as possible so that your visitors know what the next page will contain and they don't get confused..

Many well known web sites on the internet keep thier major links so that they appear on the top navigation bar. They are all in related section links and are listed on the right hand side menu. Make sure that your site has footers (links at the buttom of your site) so your visitors can easily go back up or go to the next page for other related links.

6. MINIMUM LOAD TIME - Make sure your web site load time is minimum considering many people are still using dail-up (especially outside the US). most people don't like to sit right in front of computer and wait most of the time they will simply close the window or click the next arrow on thier internet browser and this mean you just lost a sales or visitor.

By minimizing your graphics, flash, video, and MP3 it will help your site to load faster. If necesary use some kind of compression software like WINZIP and offer a download for your audio and video so they can actually watch or listen in thier computer instead of your website.  

7. CONTENT IS KING - Providing a quality and valueble information is key to a successful website. people go online to find information about things and if they find your site helpful they will save your web address to thier favorites and guess what they will return to your website. also you should give your visitors reason to come back to your site.

You've probably heard this over and over again but it's true. Good content attracts visitors and your visitors will come back again and again. After all, the internet is all about INFORMATION, INFORMATION,  INFORMATION.

Albert Hallado Owner of minisitevideotraining.com and netbizreview.com (Guide To Internet Home Business) Albert is known for interviewing online business experts and Helping Entrepreneurs Doing Business On The Internet.