• What is the main theme and purpose of your site: Who are your target audience (age, education, interests)? What type of image do you want to project e.g. business professional, casual, fun or personal tone?
• 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. Do not ever get talked in to a website created entirely in Flash. Whilst they can be very visually impressive - they are death for search engine indexing.
• Plan all your major pages and main menu links: Do this before doing anything else and try to make allowances for future growth i.e. how flexible is your menuing system - can it expand with out a total redesign? Every website should have at least 5 static pages, with other additional pages that are added on a regular basis. Dont be talked into a totally "dynamic" site where all the pages are created on the fly - some search engines hate this type of site.
• Build a better relationship with your viewers: Make sure that at least one page is an "About Us" and contact page - goes a long way in establishing a better relationship with your viewers. Your contact email address should always be visible on every page. If you want the build a mailing list, make it easy for your viewers to sign up from any page on your website.
• Make sure that every page has a link back to your main home page in case a viewer "lands" on a sub-page via a search engine and then cannot get to your home page from there.
• 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.
• 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"!
• 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.
• Reduce the number of images on your website: They make your site load very slowly and more often than not they are very unnecessary. If you think any image is essential on your site, make sure you optimize them using image editing programs so that they have a minimum file size (less than 50K).
• Keep your text paragraphs a reasonable length: If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into separate paragraphs so that the text blocks will not be too big. This is important because a block of text that is too long will deter visitors from reading your content. Use bold to emphasize only the most important words or use a different colour for emphasis. Use text sizes that read well on most resolutions but don't SHOUT! Use CSS to style your page content because they save alot of work by styling all elements on your website in one go.
• 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. Be careful, some search engines dont like this type of site.
• Test, test, test: Make absolutely sure that all the links on every page work! There is not more unprofessional than a "page not found". "You dont care enough about your website, why should I care about you and your offerings?"
• Make sure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org: Make your website cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but breaks horribly in Firefox and Opera, you will lose out on a lot of prospective visitors.
• Monetizing your website: 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 "accomodation" 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.

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