6. Provide FAQs If your site generates a lot of questions, has complex content systems, you should include an FAQ that provides answers to most common issues. Trust us, this feature will save you AND your users time.

7. Strive for Compelling Content O.K., so this isn’t exactly a true “design” point, it still must be mentioned: You must give users a reason to return.

8. Insist on Quick Access Building a page that looks good and loads quickly is not easiest of jobs. Add into equation labyrinthine nature of some of connections between you and Web page server, it is not surprising that page loading times vary wildly. Still there are things your designer can do. Try 15 Second Rule: If page doesn’t load in 15 seconds, it is too big. Tell your Web team to decrease file sizes.

9. Strive for Simplicity Make simple, common tasks easy to do. When long procedures are necessary for new users, meaningful shortcuts should be provided for experienced users.

10. Provide Feedback A well-designed site should give users feedback in response to user input, errors, and changes in status. The information should be communicated simply ,with an indication of what options are available to user.

11. Be Tolerant The site should be tolerant of errors and unusual usage. Beta testing of site should encompass anticipating a wide variety of erroneous or atypical user behaviors. While it is probably impossible to anticipate all possible mis-uses, site should handle mistakes with grace and, when possible, provide user with guidance. written by: Ric Shreves, http://www.waterandstone.com

4) Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to home page of a particular domain, i.e. other things remaining same, a home page of a domain will often rank higher for a particular keyword than any other page. When you use some of free hosting services, your index.html page is home page of your site, but not of that domain. Hence in these search engines, your site will find it very difficult to make it to top 20 or top 30, let alone top 10 for some of really competitive keywords. Just think of amount of traffic that you will lose if this happens.

5) Some search engines are now refusing to spider web sites which are hosted by free web hosts. For instance, if you have a site hosted by free web hosts, you would, until recently, have got infamous error message saying that too many pages have been submitted from your site if you tried to submit your site to AltaVista. While AltaVista now says that "your URL has been submitted for processing" if you try to submit your site, rest assured that it will not spider any site belonging to many of free web hosts even though it says that your site has been accepted. Can you afford that?

6) When your site is hosted by some of free web hosts, you will find it very difficult to get it listed in a major directory like Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! will never admit that it won't add a commercial site which is being hosted in one of free web hosts, in practice, it will be a miracle if you can get your site listed by Yahoo!!. Listing your site with Yahoo! is difficult enough even when you have your own domain. Don't make your task more difficult than what it needs to be.

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