Good sites are good communities. ------------------------------------------------ Good websites are usually good communities. The notion of selling a product online must include community building and vice-versa. The logic is simple. People want to belong to a community, and commerce will flourish in places where a community settles in, regardless of whether these places exist in cyberspace or in real world.

An online community dedicated to a specific target audience can play a very important role in arousing its members' awareness and interest in specific products and services. These highly qualified prospects will then be more receptive to seek information about related products and make purchases subsequently.

Studies in United States have confirmed that relevant content adjacent to merchant or product links helps to trigger impulse buying. On average, they reported six times higher than average click-through rates for these links.

Good sites mimic real world. -------------------------------------------- You should create virtual community that mimics real world community. It must be relevant to members' lives, works or hobbies. Your contents and information should be restricted to those that your community wants.

You must pay constant attention to changing visitor demands and interests, or your site will die. When you upload your pages to web, your job does not end there. On contrary, it has just begun. You have to continue to update your contents regularly to keep them current and relevant to your visitors' need.

Good sites encourage interactivity. ------------------------------------------------ People have a natural urge to share ideas and stories. Make your visitors feel that they have a vital role to play in your web site, and they will be encouraged to share their ideas and stories with you. If possible, you can provide interactive features such as chat rooms or bulletin boards that allow online exchanges of ideas and views.

To adapt a well-known phrase, "A web community that clicks together sticks together." Studies have shown that good websites that last for years have operated on bases of sharing free information, helping each other and keeping their contents current and relevant. The idea is to build a community with intent of including other like-minded people and then let it grows on its own.

Good sites do not stand-alone. ------------------------------------------ Good sites also do not stand-alone. You must create outgoing links that are complementary to what you have to offer. It will be a win-win situation for two related sites to share contents, exchange links and cross-reference each other.

The idea is simple. If you do not have what your visitor wants, then help him find what he wants in another site. And if your outgoing links are comprehensive enough, you may actually end up attracting more people to your site as a one-stop, quick reference source for everything they need.

A good example would be Web Tool Box at http://www.aloha-city.com ools/. It contained hundreds of links to web resources and tools that are useful to online business owners, webmasters, designers and programmers.

Final Considerations. ----------------------------- The above guidelines are meant for designing third-generation websites. Conceived by design, these websites focus more on styles, functionality and contents, and less on technological features.

Unless necessary, you should avoid using Java plug-ins, multimedia, shockwave, flash, animation and large, useless graphics in your site. They load slowly and make no significant contribution to overall effectiveness of page.

Ideally, you should keep file size of your web pages below 60 Kbytes to facilitate fast loading time. Remember that web surfers are very impatient people. They would be more than happy to "click" to another site if your site takes more than 10 seconds to download.

http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/navigation.htm

Linking

Ensure from first day that all of links within your own site work perfectly. There is no excuse for broken internal links - these are a sure sign of an amateur. As far as external links go, accept fact that these will break occasionally. The web is a rapidly changing environment and you will virtually never be notified when someone moves a page or closes their site. Just check occasionally and update your links as needed.

http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/gooddesignexternallinks.htm

Site Map

A site map is similar in concept to a table of contents. This is a great way to introduce your visitors to whole picture of your site in all of it's glory. It also helps drive visitors (and spiders) to pages other than few that they happen to find via search engines.

http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/gooddesignsitemap.htm

What's New

Keep your visitors coming back by including "What's New" sections on your home page and in a special section.

http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/gooddesignwhatsnew.htm

Frequently Asked Questions

Since idea behind your web site is to communicate, why not create a frequently asked questions section? This answers more common questions and helps prevent you from getting overwhelmed with common, everyday requests for answers.

http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/gooddesignfaq.htm

Provide A Guestbook

All good web sites provide a guestbook function for their visitors. This gives people a way to communicate their feelings about site to webmaster and rest of world.

http://www.internet-tips.net/Webmaster/maintguestbooks.htm

There are many, many other things you can do to create a good web site design. Just remember your ultimate goal is to communicate something. If you are selling a product, you are trying to communicate about that product in such a way that your visitor wants to purchase it. If your site is about your cat, than that is what you are communicating. The better your design, better your message gets across.