Too often a websites starts out with, "we are Widgemen Co. Founded in blah blah blah by my grand pappy Steve Hairs". Be effective! Why should they choose you, what makes you different, what do you offer. The first sentence should grab attention.
Text should not span across the whole page or be difficult for people to read. Please use paragraphs. People are much less likely to read a big block of text than a well ordered and organized page.
Do not have an overwhelming color that distracts from the content. Red is horrible for webdesign, period. Don't use too much red, it's proven raise blood pressure and agitate people. The navigation should not outpower the main content in intensity or size. PAstels are good to use because they have weak intensity and easily work with text.
People will see that you're serious about your site if you take the effort to customize your layout to your sites content. Dot Coms are much less likely to be outdated and are easier for people to remember. You can see plenty of competent webdesigners with nothing to do hanging around webmaster forums. Post job offer and you'll be sent examples and profiles almost immediately. Do your best to push your idea, and if your not satisfied don't be afraid to say it. Have similar sites in mind to use as examples of what you want and don't want. If you don't have the money check out our best free web hosts guide.
If your site has links everywhere like flashkit.com people get overwhelmed. They click click off somewhere in one of the alliate sites while confused and not get frustrated, doing their search again. Have a clear, simple, organization without too much variation on the subjects.
Get Webalizer or Analog to parse your weblogs and see where your visitors come from. It's important finding the keywords that bring visitors to your site. Say your number 5 for a certain keyword on google and you get 20 hits a day for it. Get to number one with a little bit of effort and you'll be able to triple your hits. To learn how to increase standings check out our Search Engine Optimization FAQ Guide. If you don't have a webserver that allows you to check weblogs see our finding paid hosting guide. This paragraph is an example of too many links embedded in a paragraph. It's just annoying.
Many websites don't make a profit for a long long time. You can help cover the funds by using pay per click programs like google adsense to pay for the server and bandwidth. Obviously you wont want to put ads on your products page, but you can try adding image ads for closely related items.
If your not on a 56k you must pay very close attention to your loading size. There are still many people with 56k and if the page takes too long to load, they'll get frustrated and leave before giving it a chance. Check out our webpage size optimization guide.
Add your policies on returns, privacy policies, and delivery time clearly. Most people may not be looking for it or even thinking about that during purchases, but finding them makes them feel more secure, and makes them give consideration as if they had already bought it unwittingly making them feel as if the product is already in their hands.
Add a verisign seal or a better beauro seal if you can. Make them feel more secure with their transaction. Don't limit them to just paypal, add different forms of payment.
Find other companies in your similar standing selling complementary products or offering similar services. Intelligently choose a keyword and ask them to link you with it in exchange that they link you. Go to google and search related keywords to the keywords your targetting to find affiliates. Choosing similarly ranked affiliates competing for the keywords your working towards helps their ranking too.
Adding your site to directories like yahoo or dmoz will get you in the search engines quick, and if the title of your site is keyword rich, will raise your rankings.
Check out our webmasters section for good tools and utilities webmasters can use to optimize and advertise their page.