So, how do you make a professional site? That's simple, have no mistakes. Your site needs to have good content, design and be easy to use, but you also need to pay attention to details. That old saying explains it all, "The devil's in details."

You need to pay close attention to small things to make a professional site. Checking, and checking again, for simple errors.

What are these simple errors? Some of main ones include: * Misspellings, like: "to" instead of "too", or "their" instead of "there" or "they're" * Broken links * Broken graphics * Incorrect indents, paragraphs breaks and bulleted lists

I went to a website last week that offered health information. What I found were several pages of text that had no paragraph breaks, instead, each page was just one long block of text. It was very difficult to read text, and after seeing this small error I wasn't sure how accurate their information was.

Many Web designers seem to focus more on appearance than functionality, and while an attractive site is helpful, visitors that become frustrated by inability of a site to function well, will leave almost immediately, never to return!

Just as important in designing an e-commerce-style Web site, is a somewhat basic knowledge of Web site design, with some simple design skills included. While a thorough knowledge of design and functionality is not important, designing an e-commerce site does have some requirements, or else you'll always find yourself going back relentlessly and changing features and functionality in a vain effort to stay abreast of your site visitor's needs.

E-commerce sites need to focus on some main areas of functionality in order to ensure maximum sales:

1. Load time, page size, and navigability. Slowly loading pages, overly large or small pages, and difficult navigation will only frustrate visitors. Visitors should never have to "wait" for a page to load, should never have to scroll back and forth in order to read a page, nor should they have to "search" relentlessly for information they want in order to purchase. Clean, simple lines, with fast loading, well laid out pages, make most sales.

Here's a great service to check your Web site load time:

http://www.tracert.com/

This one actually pings your Web site from different locations worldwide and returns average load time for your site, instead of simply returning a theoretical value based on size of your Web page.

2. Less use of graphics. While graphics are pleasant and intriguing, they don't necessarily achieve more sales. The opposite may be true if too many graphics are used. A page that is graphics heavy loads more slowly and graphics themselves may take visitors' minds off main purpose of site, i. e. "sales". If graphics are used at all, they should be optimized for Web placement, and reduced to smallest size possible for viewing. Most graphics can easily be reduced by approximately twenty percent without affecting quality of graphics.

Here's a neat tool for optimizing your Web site graphics if you are not very familiar with graphics software:

http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm

3. The use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS effectively eliminates need of entering repetitive tags like FONT, reducing your page size significantly. Such tags can consume up to 5-7% of your page size. Imagine how much bandwidth you'll save if your Web site has more than 100 pages!