As I'd mentioned, you ideally want your visitors to come back after their initial visit so penetrating with certain standards is important. Don't just design the website with what you like; you need to reflect your visitors as well. Below we'll follow some tips and Guidelines a brief explanation of each along with a link to detailed information for those tips that require additional explanation.

Not all computer monitors are created equally. There are still people out there that are using monitors with 800 x 600 resolutions so it's important that you attempt to design your website with those visitors in mind. The best way to work around this is to design your site in terms of percentages instead of pixels.

Images take additional time to load and can slow a page down. If this is the case, a visitor may not sit around for the page to load and may go off to another website. Again, not all computers are created equal, there are people who still use dial-up so take that into consideration before you load your website with images.

You'll want to make sure that you stick with some of the more common fonts such as Arial, Times, etc. The font that you're reading on this website is 'Tahoma' with a font size of 9. You may be tempted to use some fancy-chancy font, but it may not be easy to read for your visitors.

These two tips are important because it demonstrates professionalism. If your website has a bunch of typos or links to other pages or website doesn't work it reflects on you so be sure to run your spell-check and verify that your hyperlinks are linked properly.

Often times you here to visit websites that you like when deciding on a colour scheme, but I don't agree with this. My suggestion is to visit some of the major players and see the colour schemes and layouts that they use. They have obviously done the research to determine what works best so I would recommend using their knowledge when building your website. With that said, I'm not saying to copy their website by any means, I'm simply recommending that you consider what the major players have done.

This is going to help your visitors navigate through your website. This is also a great way to push your more popular items or most important content. You can see to the left that I've listed the items in my navigation from the basic information to the more advanced information. You'll also see that I have a top navigation that lists a few items that I feel are important, and I want to be clearly seen.