When you are laying out your site, be sure not to bury a page or section. By that I mean that visitors to your site should be able to get to any page or section using no more than three links. It's not as hard it may sound. If you find yourself burying a page someplace, just redesign layout or create a page that will let buried page be closer to a main page. So if you want people to buy socks on your site, don't make them click to clothes page, then click to coat page, then click to sundry page, then click to footwear page, then click to sock page, then click to wool sock page. Make sundry page one of your main pages, like clothing page.

Another thing to remember is to place your links in same place on every page, so visitors can easily navigate on each page. On my site I place links at top and bottom of each page, so if they read down a long list of events they don't have to scroll back up to top to use a link. Of course, you could also put a "back to top" link at bottom of each page instead. I put "back to top" links after end of each book listing on my Books page. So if they wanted to see just one book, after reading about it they can easily go back to top.

Be sure that your links and buttons are easy to read, and descriptive of where visitor will be take. If you have a coat page, call link "Coats," not "Things To Keep You Warm," and be sure text can be easily read. Don't make text too small or similar to background color. No black on purple or yellow on white.

When laying out your website think like a person who is visiting for first time. Pretend you don't know anything about site, you're in a rush and you're trying to find something on site that Google said was there. Make experience of visiting your site, easy, fast and enjoyable.

Content sites tend to be quite plain looking on outside but are stuffed full of useful information on inside. Web surfers love content sites. Why? Because they find exactly what they're looking for or a link to it. The whole idea of Internet in first place was to fulfill this need for useful information.

Pros Valuable information for visitors Visitors likely to return again Search engines love them

Cons Normally not as "pretty" as poster sites Spammy techniques being used to create "dud" content

Don't Have A Clue Site These are interesting. A DHAC site is an anomaly. They're designed by people who decide they want a website but have no clue how to go about it. They contact their ISP for information on how to do this. 45 minutes later their first creation is online.

The DHAC site has following features:

Graphics that take 10 minutes to load 50% of graphics are missing Flashing banner Animated graphical menu Flashing body text 75% of links don't work Graphics scattered about page Blue text on green background Frames used extensively Incomplete HTML tags H1 tags used for all body text i.e. huge text

It's not fair to generalize like this I know but we've all seen these sites. They're there and they give us a direct path that we should not follow.

Pros Good to poke fun at Great examples of how not to design a website

Cons They're awful

Some websites will thrive and survive in 2004 and beyond.

Other websites will weaken and die.

Which category does your website fall under?