Today web site designers have various options in terms of tools and technologies with which they can build their web pages easily. Many questions arise: should we use Flash, do we need database driven web pages, do we need a shopping cart for our e-commerce web site etc ... etc…

But we will take a step back and deal with some of the fundamental questions/issues in web site design.

google_ad_client = "pub-2331144157348643"; google_alternate_ad_url = "http://www.killersites.com/killerSitesGoogle.htm"; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; google_ad_format = "468x60_as"; google_color_border = "F9F9F9"; google_color_bg = "F9F9F9"; google_color_link = "0033FF"; google_color_url = "008000"; google_color_text = "000000"; //-->  Framesets are not required in most web sites as they will kill you with search engines.

Do not use a 'heavy' background in your web pages since that will distract the users from what you are trying to present to them and make the text hard to read. Remember what you are trying to do with your website and for most, it is not trying to impress people with some tacky background tile. Keep it easy to read; there is a reason why solid colored text on a solid colored background is used often on web pages and in print.

Always use sharp clear pictures in the web sites. This is particularly necessary because a good looking web page can be made with just one clear sharp image and at the same time, the best looking web page can be made to look bad with just one crappy image.
In case you are a company, get sharp clear copy of your logo. You must look professional, so that people will have confidence in giving you their money. A crappy looking logo will fail to deliver it.

It is better to avoid the IE page transitions. IE (Internet Explorer) can create many special effects, things like page transitions (page wipes, etc. …) are tempting and may be suitable sometimes, but for 99% of web sites they are not.

6. Avoid the flying text: Again, the decision whether or not to do this has much to do with the content of your web pages, but it should be clear that for most websites this would not be a good thing.

When you are trying to sell something, having live credit card processing will increase your sales considerably. Sometimes when people want to start selling online they avoid the perceived trouble of hooking up with a credit card processing service because of the programming requirement. This is a great blunder; studies have clearly shown that web pages that provide credit card processing in their e-commerce, enabled web pages (web pages that sell stuff) have much greater conversions.

Above all, see that the web site pages are no more than 60-70k if you can and keep things very simple so your clients have an easy time finding matters. You can help this along by strategically making use of the browsers caching capabilities.

In a nutshell: your web-browser will reuse images that it has loaded. So, for example, if you have an image on your 1st page that you also use on 2 other pages in your website, this image only gets downloaded once by the browser and subsequent times the browser will automatically load a copy of the image it has from its own cache. This can really speed up things from the surfer's point of view and also saves your bandwidth.