A well designed website will help your users easily find what they are looking for and will make your business look professional. Designing a website from the beginning with Search Engines and your users in mind will help your website to be a success.

1. Simplify, simplify, simplify. What is the most important thing you want to tell the visitor about on each page? If a web site has too much information on a page, it ends up being confusing to the user. Additionally, Search Engines actually prefer that you separate topics out onto their own pages, as it sees this as more relevant to the users.

2. Personalize: Even if your website is designed by the greatest professionals in the business, if you do not allow your customers to get to know you, or to believe in you, you will have difficulty selling your ideas.

3. First impressions are very important. When people arrive at your web site, you have about five seconds to convince them to stay. On your homepage, keep it simple, communicate what you do and what makes your business different.

4. Design is important, content is more so: Good content is what sells your ideas and products. Is your copy delivering the message you intended for it to? Grammar and spelling ARE important; so proofread everything you write before it goes live.Don't make an all Flash website. Don't make visitors wait for your site to download every time they visit it. Don't make them scroll down to see the last three lines of a block of text.

5. Be personal.Use photographs of people and testimonials from happy clients to build trust. Make sure you include your address and phone numbers on your contact page. People like being able to easily contact you and know where you are located.

6. Make sure to do your keyword research before you start building your site. After discovering what users are searching, you should then choose 6 to 10 phrases you want to rank for and try to incorporate them naturally into your page titles and headlines.

7. Limit your color palette. Professional looking websites tend to use 2-4 colors. This site uses green and white. Use color to help highlight important features on your web site.

8. Use web conventions.For example, using underlined text when linking and make your logo link back to your homepage. People have certain expectations driven by their experiences of other websites. You need to understand what these are and make sure you accommodate them in your design.

9. Make a simple start: When you begin your site, take everything one page at a time, and optimize each page for the best results before moving on to the next. This means that you should make sure that every page is perfect before leaving it for the next one.

10. Design is important, content is more so: Good content is what sells your ideas and products. Is your copy delivering the message you intended for it to? Grammar and spelling ARE important; so proofread everything you write before it goes live.