Some good design tips

One of the primary keys to a successful website is a good design. A poorly designed site actually discourages visitors from even getting to your site, and to leave quickly when (and if) they arrive. A well designed site encourages people to visit and to remain once they find it. In fact, the best designed sites encourage communication, which in turn causes people to continue to visit time after time.

So what is this thing called a "well designed web site"? In concept it can be summarized in a few words:

A well designed web site communicates and encourages communication.

It's as simple as this statement implies. However, the implications of this statement are far reaching and critical to the success of your web site. For example, one of the critical questions to ask yourself when you are designing your site is "who and what are you communicating with?" Why is this important? Because in addition to your visitors with their complex requirements, you area also communicating with search engine spiders, internet mapping routines and other automated tools. These are critically important to the success of your site.

Okay, so what do you need to do to make your site communicate to everyone and everything possible? Some suggestions are listed below.

Design Your Site: Before you do anything, sit down and think about your site. Virtually all successful projects begin with good planning, analysis and design work. Leave out these steps and you may find yourself reimplementing your site over and over. Think it takes too long? Well, I have a question for you: "why is it everyone has time to do it over but over time to do it right?"
Alt Tags: To make your site communicate better to those people (and search engine spiders_ who do not view graphics, be sure and include ALT tags with each image.
Metatags: You want to tell the search engines (and other spiders) about your site? Include the proper Metatags on each page. This helps improve your rankings on some search engines.
Navigation: Be sure that your navigation makes sense. Help your visitors get around on your site by making it easy for them to find things.
Linking: Ensure from the first day that all of the links within your own site work perfectly. There is no excuse for broken internal links - these are a sure sign of an amateur. As far as external links go, accept the fact that these will break occasionally. The web is a rapidly changing environment and you will virtually never be notified when someone moves a page or closes their site. Just check occasionally and update your links as needed.
Site Map: A site map is similar in concept to a table of contents. This is a great way to introduce your visitors to the whole picture of your site in all of it's glory. It also helps drive visitors (and spiders) to pages other than the few that they happen to find via search engines.
What's New: Keep your visitors coming back by including "What's New" sections on your home page and in a special section.
Frequently Asked Questions: Since the idea behind your web site is to communicate, why not create a frequently asked questions section? This answers the more common questions and helps prevent you from getting overwhelmed with common, everyday requests for answers.
Provide A Guestbook: All good web sites provide a guestbook function for their visitors. This gives people a way to communicate their feelings about the site to the webmaster and the rest of the world.
There are many, many other things you can do to create a good web site design. Just remember your ultimate goal is to communicate something. If you are selling a product, you are trying to communicate about that product in such a way that your visitor wants to purchase it. If your site is about your cat, than that is what you are communicating. The better your design, the better your message gets across.