INTRODUCTION

Choosing a web design sometimes can be tedious if you don't have the right resources or you simply don't know how. First off you need to differentiate what theme you're going to have. Is it going to 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.

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

LOOK AND FEEL - 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 and don't include too much advertising.

GRAPHICS AND COLORS - OK! folks this is very important! Many webmasters fail on this one. Your graphics should relate to 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. Now using colors is very important too, but be very careful on this one. Personally I would only used two or three combinations of colors and it needs to match the overall look and feel.

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 judgment. 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 multiple 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 migraine.

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 use white backgrounds. Google, Yahoo, and eBay these companies are multi-Billion Dollars companies and they all use white backgrounds and there's a reason for that.

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 like Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera and so on..

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..

Many well known web sites on the internet keep their 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 bottom of your site) so your visitors can easily go back up or go to the next page for other related links.

MINIMUM LOAD TIME - Make sure your web site load time is minimum considering many people are still using dial-up (especially outside the US). By minimizing your graphics, flash, video, and MP3 it will help your site to load faster. If necessary use some kind of compression software.

CONTENT IS KING - 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.