Two things are of primal importance - content, and how easy it is to reach that content. If you want people to buy from your site, don't play with them "Treasure Hunt" game. Everything should be there within reach of a single click. If you want your visitor to access a particular section, link to that section should be visible as soon as first page, or for that matter, any page of your web site comes up.

You should know what sort of people are going to visit your site; who are your target, and what are their behavioral patterns. If you can manage, design your site according to minimum software/hardware profile so that most people can access your site.

Having a long-term plan pays well. Especially if getting into Yahoo! is a bog thing for you. The Yahoo! Guys don't include a site again and again. Some people design same pages differently for different search engines, but as a beginner, it'll only create obfuscation. Just create an elementary, user-friendly, easily navigable site, put in lots meaningful content, and submit it manually to main search engines. You can get a list of submission links at http://www.bytesworth.com/submit_urls.asp. Some of links might have changed, but they were working when I was updating page.

For a comprehensive list of guidelines on how you should be designing a web site for maximum usability, pay a visit to http://www.w3c.org.

This link refers to a page that is located on YOUR web site, and not someone else's. Now, here is an example of an absolute link:

Notice that this link will take you to exact same page that first one will. This is just a different way to build your links. You can also link to someone else's web site using absolute links: Can you use relative links to refer to an outside web site? No. Only absolute links can do that. And don't forget to use "http://" in each absolute link tag. PROBLEM 5: TEXT IS MISSING ON THE PAGE SOLUTION: This can happen for different reasons, but all of them have to do with closing tags:

1) When a closing table tag is missing, entire table content might be missing, too. So don't forget to close all your TABLE, TR and TD tags.

2) You forgot to close a comment and browser "thinks" that rest of text has also been commented out. Make sure you close every comment that you open.

3) You forgot to close a quotation mark in a tag. For example, if you use quotes in a IMG SRC or A HREF tags, you must close them:

page to display incorrectly. Fix it by adding a closing quotation after graphic name.

4) If you using in forms, make sure you close it with a tag. PROBLEM 6: VISITORS CAN'T SEE YOUR FANCY FONTS SOLUTION: Do not use your fancy fonts. There are only a handful of fonts that every computer user has installed. They are: Verdana, Arial, Courier, & Times New Roman. If you try to use some other font such as Impact or FreeStyle Script, and your visitors don't have them installed, they will see your text in whatever font their browser is set to.

If you REALLY want your visitors to see your handsome fonts, then turn some of your text into graphics. Your graphics will be displayed same on every computer, and your visitors will be able to see fonts you meant for them to see. PROBLEM 7: TOO MUCH HORIZONTAL SCROLLING REQUIRED SOLUTION: Put your text into a table and make it no more than 85% in width and centered. This way, regardless of how large or small their monitors are, your visitors will always see your text centered with no horizontal scrolling necessary. PROBLEM 8: THE TABLE IS WIDER THAN SPECIFIED SOLUTION: Sometimes even you specify table width as 500 pixels, it might still stretch to all 700. There are two reasons for that.

1) You have a graphic in that table that is wider than table itself. Reduce its size and table will shrink as well.

2) You are using a long URL somewhere in table text. Shorten it or remove it and you will see table shrink to its specified size. PROBLEM 9: WEB PAGE DISPLAYS OLD LINKS AND IMAGES SOLUTION: Refresh (or reload) page by clicking button on toolbar of your browser. Sometimes graphics are still not being refreshed in which case you need to do this: right-click on graphic choose "view image" or "open image" click "Refresh" when graphic is displayed by itself

Now come back to your web page and press "refresh" button one more time. You should now see updated images. Also, if you are using an FTP program to upload your files, don't forget to click "Refresh" in FTP window before uploading new files. Otherwise, you will simply upload old versions. PROBLEM 10: BACKGROUND DOESN'T SHOW SOLUTION: Make sure to upload your background image along with other files. Also, make sure you upload it into right directory (see "missing image on page" above for more information) PROBLEM 11: CAN'T ACCESS YOUR HOME PAGE SOLUTION: if you get an "access denied" error or a list of files when you are trying to access your web site, make sure you named your home page correctly. Every hosting company has it set up so that very first page of your site must be named "index.html". Sometimes, though, they will require your first file to be called "welcome.html", "default.html", "home.html", or "default.htm".

There is only one way to find out: ask them! Or visit their web site to see if they specify default file name in their tech support section. Notice that "default.html" and "default.htm" are two different files. You can name your files either way, but only one of them will be accepted as a default one.