10 Guidelines for Successful Web Sites
Make it easy to read
Text and background colors should be chosen carefully. Established typographical and web guidelines for textual content and page contrast should be observed as much as possible. Never use horizontal scroll bars and don’t make pages too long.
Make it easy to find
A web site can be promoted online via search engines, directories, award sites, through banner advertising, electronic magazines, blogs, links from other web sites, print ads, radio, television, brochures, business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, etc., and word-of-mouth.
Make it useful
A useful website is much more likely to gain incoming links from other sites as owners of other sites discover a new useful site and add bookmarks to it from their own sites. This is the best way to improve search engine ranking.
Motivate site visitors
You want site visitors to contact you and inquire about your services or offers, or buy your products. Visitors should be motivated to purchase a product or service from your site, or at least contact you for more information.
Make it easy to navigate
It should be easy for visitors to find what they are looking for.
Make it fast and accessible
Visitors should be able to get the information they want quickly. Clean, lean and fast-loading web sites get more traffic.
Make it consistent
Uncluttered structure throughout a web site shows professionalism. Reinforce the image of your company, organization or idea and use it as an extension of your business brand.
Keep it simple
Avoiding annoying intro screens, slow loading "Flash" banners and other detractors from the content discourage further investigation of a web site. These things should be kept in moderation and the site visitor should be able to chose whether to view the extra content.
Use web standards
Adhere to W3C Web Consortium standards. Web sites should be built using XHTML and CSS. This will also help the site be future-ready, faster to download and is more likely to appear correctly in all the popular web browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, etc. This can also help increase the breadth of the site’s potential audience.
Encourage return visits
Adding new content regularly keeps people coming back. This will help encourage them to pass the web site link onto others.