Design tips
These design tips are brought to you by Web Genius, Web Site Designers in Melbourne.
The best web sites are easy to navigate, everything else is secondary. Attractive design is very important, but if a visitor can not find the info they are after they will soon go somewhere else, no matter how good your site looks.
Quick loading pages are also important, keep images to a minimum and have all images optimised.
Keep the number of colours to a minimum, unless your corporate colours or your industry (say children's toys) requires many colours.
Keep all text as readable as possible. Use screen friendly fonts, i.e. "sans serif" fonts, those are the ones without the little feet like verdana and arial. "serif" fonts, such as Times New Roman are best for printed pages, but not good on computer screens.
Keep text black (or a very dark colour) on white if at all possible, this is the most legible combination.
Use an easy to understand layout. A wide ranging study discovered that most users would rather see every web site laid out in the same format, something akin to amazon.com, with a header, navigation down the left hand side and content in the middle. Avant-garde designs are great for your web designer to show off their skills but usually very bad at helping your visitors quickly find the info they are after.
Keep info short and sharp, people don't like to read for a start, but even less so on a computer screen.
Put all terms in lay mans terms. Have someone that knows nothing about what you do read your content, chances are if they can't understand your content neither will anyone else, especially a visitor to your site who, on average, will only invest a few seconds in looking at your site before going somewhere else.