You want to be sure to include all there is to know about your products and/or services. Many people fail to understand just how important the design of a web site is to your online image. In order to achieve online success, one must have both a wonderful product or service and a great design.

Do not make your site overwhelmingly busy. Have you ever visited a site where there were thousands of animated pictures, fluorescent text and colors, crowded pictures, and huge text?  . Don't run off your visitors without letting them read what you've got to say, or they'll never buy.

Can your visitors get around easily, or are they easily lost? Do you have a link to get back to your home page and/or "table of contents" on EVERY page or only a select few? What if someone decides that your website is so great they decide to link to one of your secondary pages?  Other webmasters won’t tell you when they've linked to you. So, if they link to a page that isn't connected to your home page ... how are they supposed to find it?? It doesn't occur to most people to take the base of the URL they've visited. 90% of the time, you've just lost a potential customer. Also don't make the visitor scroll horizontally to read your content. That's pretty annoying. Ensure that your content is visible on the whole page as far as possible. Vertical scrolling is just fine.

Poor grammar or spelling is the end-all, be-all of presenting yourself unprofessionally online. After all, if you can't spell correctly, you don't pay attention to details or small things that make a product or service great. Well, that's what your visitors think. So run your pages through a spell check once or twice, and have someone else proof read them.

Have you visited a site that changes designs, backgrounds, and navigation systems completely whenever you click a link? You feel as though you're at another site, and you don't know where you are. So, keep your web site's design consistent, and make it clear to the visitor where they are on the Internet and on your site. Use two to three colors and stick to it.

It is quite irritating to have a site that takes long to load. Well that is due to heavy graphics. You should use images that are small in terms of file size. The best way to go about doing this is to compress your images to a more reasonable size. Try something like Ulead's Smart Saver Pro - http://www.ulead.com or Adobe Photoshop itself which has an optimizer in it. Instead of using "Save As", use "Save for Web".

For the most part Backgrounds have a tendency to make a site feel very unprofessional. If you don't know what you're doing, stick with a plain white background with well contrasting text. It's simple, and it's very clean and easy to read.

Perhaps the biggest indicator of someone who doesn't have a clue what they're doing online is huge font sizes. Keep your fonts at a reasonable level, but make sure you don't make it too small.