Consider automatic e-mail responses. Many times I have been sent an automatic response informing me someone will answer my query shortly. If that is what you are telling your potential customers, are you actually following up?

5.NAVIGATE I get to your site. Now what? Am I expected to know what I'm looking for? How do I know what's on your site if you don't provide me an easy way to get around? Provide simple navigation at start, so your visitors can get into your site quickly. Too many options are daunting and not enough are frustrating. You need to achieve a balance that will depend on your content. Research suggests a maximum of eight links on front page is best for your site visitors.

Can you break up your content into sections and tag way to each section, expanding when you get there? One word of warning: don't make your visitors go to six or seven pages before they get any information. They won't do it and when they leave, they will never come back.

6.INFORM No matter what type of web site you have, you are there to inform your visitors. If you offer a product or service, let people know how much it costs, its sizes, colours, models and all other relevant information. If it is very detailed, use a summary with a link to more detail. Remember your online customer can't touch or feel, smell or try out your product. If you don't put this information directly on your site (if it's sensitive or requires further details to make a quote), then it's even more important that you have somewhere they can ask! When they do ask - ANSWER them!

Where are you? Your visitors are not from one geographic area. Being outside of US, I see sites all time that fail to offer any assistance to international viewers. This is a major oversight because you WILL get visitors from other countries. Provide currency exchange and delivery information if necessary or state your service or delivery areas clearly where it is easy to find.

7.DELIVER If you have a physical product, where are you prepared to send it? Where on your site have you told your customers? If you can only ship to a limited geographical area, make sure it is displayed prominently.

I recently compared companies about a particular product I intended to purchase online. I made my decision and completed entire ordering procedure providing all my details including credit card number, before discovering company only shipped within US. I had looked in their ‘about' and FAQ's to see if they had restrictions on shipping but found nothing. It was only provided when shipping was being calculated. I found this frustrating and annoying because I had wasted my time. Do you have a similar geographic restriction? Is it prominently mentioned?

You can't get everything perfect for everyone, different cultures require different information, but you can strive to be helpful and courteous. After all, excellent service counts.

The size of a web page, and therefore content are dependent on type of information being provided. However, many site visitors don't want to read a condensed version of 'War and Peace' on a single page. See if you can logically break content down into easy to read chunks.

Unless your site is an art gallery, keep images to a minimum. Try using simple 16 colour GIF images as they're small and fast loading.

The following list gives you a few good design tips to consider when preparing your web site content.

-> Do make your text easy to read. -> Do use short sentences. -> Do break up your text into paragraphs. -> Do use bullets and lists to make your point. -> Create textual variation with heading size and colour but don't make your text too small to read easily. -> Be consistent - consistency creates a professional image. -> Don't use fancy fonts except as 16 colour GIFs as your masterpiece may not display correctly on every browser. -> Don't use weird text colour/background colour combinations. -> Stick to one colour for each font type (eg Headings - blue, sub headings - teal, main text - black) -> Don't be too adventurous with changing hyperlink colours. Many people, especially newbies, expect blue, underlined links. -> Leave white space to create a 'clean' looking design. -> Ask two or three friends (who's opinions you value) how they find your site navigation and layout.

You can also experiment with cascading style sheets (CSS) and bold, italics or even highlighted words and phrases. For example, this code inserted into your document will create a yellow highlight over word 'Highlight'. Highlight

All preparation may seem like a whole lot of hard work, but it will pay off. Over lifetime of your web site, good layout design and navigation allow your site to grow without creating you massive headaches.