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Maybe site is just plain ugly, or looks like it was done by a kid attacked by a box of Crayola crayons.

If you're going to do business on Internet, you need a professional web site. This is your business card and visitors' introduction to who you are.

First impressions count. You want to make a good first impression, and you want to get your potential visitor to bookmark your site.

Here's how to create a good first impression and keep your new visitor coming back for more.

1. Give your site a purpose. Do you know what you want your web site to do?

Maybe your goal is to make sale. If this is your goal, then you want to make sure that you include useful content for your visitor to read.

Make it interesting, and emphasize benefits of your offer. Give him/her useful information.

2. Make it fast loading I have cable modem, so if I'm really interested in site, I'll wait around for it to download so that I can look at content.

Unfortunately, most people are using dial-up. If your site takes more than 10 to 15 seconds to load, your visitor will just click away and go somewhere else.

The easiest way to make sure your site is fast loading is to go easy on graphics. Although graphics can make your site visually appealing, they can take forever to load.

If you must include graphics, then use a graphics compressor to shrink your graphics so that that they load more quickly.

Below are some sites online where you can shrink .gif and .jpg, your most common graphic files, for free.

http://www.spinwave.com/crunchers.html http://www.netmechanic.com/accelerate.htm

Now I've seen some pretty terrific interactive sites online. They may use flash or some other kind of scripting to make them interactive.

Although these types of sites can be fun places to visit, if you have a business site, you want to skip creating this type of interactivity. You'll have slow load times, and you'll lose visitors fast.

3. Choose a good design Keep it simple. Stick to same color scheme. You don't want something that looks like it was painted by a two year old.

Think about what works well on screen. Have you ever tried to read yellow type on an orange background? Think about your reader.