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10 Tips for Effective Websites

1. Know exactly what you want your website to accomplish. "sell the product" is not focused enough. Drill down to what the focal point is of what you want to do. Then work towards that goal. If it is attracting new customers, answering visitor's questions, providing support and answers, etc. solve that problem first.
2. Just because you can do great things with sounds, color, and graphics - does that mean you have to use them? No! Ask yourself, will this technique add value and is the best way to communicate what I want to say? And just a tip, not everyone is visiting your site at a home computer. Many people are at work, or in public places. Therefore, do not use sounds that play automatically! How disturbing is it to be visiting a site and it starts playing music, or a quote from a movie so loud that everyone around can hear it? Lose the audio or give the visitor the choice to click if they want to hear the audio.
3. Content - Not Art is King Yes, your web site needs to be visually appealing. But content is what keeps people coming back (with the exception of graphic or photo related sites) But if it takes more than 30 seconds to load, your visitors will go elsewhere. This is the average time a net surfer will wait for a site to load. Not everyone has DSL, Broadband or other high speed connections.
4. Don't waste a page, any page. Your opening page should say who you are and immediately help the visitor find what they are searching for. Don't start a page with "blah, blah, blah,Click Here To Enter" The web is not an expensive medium, but your visitors time is. Even a magazine cover has information about what is in that issue.
5. Balance - Balance your use of text vs. graphics. Download time vs. Page content. Background image/color vs. foreground. Screen view vs. print view. (lots of people still like to read a printed page, offer a printer friendly page)
6. Navigation & Consistency - Make your site easy to surf around. Make navigation consistent on every page so visitors can find their way around. It is a web site, not a web maze. Always put a link back to your home page on your secondary pages. A visitor might arrive at a secondary page and without a link to your home page they can only go back to where they came. And they will miss the rest of your site. And make your site consistent in it's theme and apperance. You do not want your guests to click onto another page and wonder if they are still on the same site as they started. And consistent theme also helps reinforce your "brand".
7. Follow the 3 click rule. If a visitor can't find what they are looking for in 3 clicks - they will be clicking elsewhere. Use pull down menus, site maps, site search tools, make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for.
8. The Little Things -
   Hit Counters If you use a hit counter, make sure you are going to get high traffic numbers. Imagine visiting a page and you are the 25th visitor in the last 6 months. What does that say about the site? And don't cheat by starting the counter @ 100001. Make your webmaster supply you with accurate visitor statistics on a quarterly or monthly basis.
   Last Modified Date - This is very similar to the hit counter problem. If you are going to date your pages when you update them, for goodness sakes update them often. If your site has a last modified date of 6 months ago, is a visitor going to look for current information? No, they are off your site quicker than they got there.
   Email addresses - use your domain name for your email. Nothing says amateur like an email address that is your aol or hotmail address instead of your domain name. Email accounts normally come with the domain - use them.
   
9. Speaking of modified on date - update early & often. It keeps people coming back to your site. And search engines like fresh contact also. Pages updated on a regular basis will attract more users, more repeat users, and better results in the search engine rankings. Your website is not a billboard, you can't expect the same message to keep attracting people. Yes new visitors may find you, but how many people will keep coming back or tell others about your site? Remember the old adage about keeping customers rather than getting new ones? Your site is an active communication, sales, & support tool. Use it as such.
10. Professional help = professional site. Just like many other areas of your business, don't trust your website to an inexperienced developer. Like my CPA friend, Dean Harloff, says, "don't think of it as an expense, think of it as an asset." This is a case of you getting what you pay for - A site with broken links, bad design, and a poor representation of your business. Or to use my own analogy- "just cause I can swing a hammer, do you want me building your house?