People have gotten wise to Internet amateurism and a poor looking website will turn many visitors off buying. Similarly, a site that lacks focus and tries to be too many things to too many people will not have visitors scrambling to give hand over their credit-card details.

In short, if your website is to succeed, it must inspire visitor confidence, be clear about its purpose and give off a general air of success.

Fortunately, you don't need specialist training in web design to create an effective and professional website. Just keep it SIMPLE and keep it FOCUSED and you'll make life easier for both yourself and your visitors.

Here are 27 things you can do that will give your website a credibility boost:

1. Aim to capture your visitors' interest as soon as they arrive on your page. It's important that you let them know IMMEDIATELY what they'll find on your site and what they gain by being there. Try to come up with an opening headline that will capture attention of those people you're trying to reach.

2. Be consistent in your design. Each page should have same fonts (text style), same navigation links, same general layout, same color scheme, etc.

3. Choose your colors carefully. Don't put inappropriate colors together. I read an article recently that suggests that designers should look at colors they're putting together on their web page and ask themselves if they would put wallpaper with that color scheme in their living-room.

4. Use a plain color background (i.e. no fancy textures or designs). Make sure your text contrasts STRONGLY with your background color -- black text on a white background is best combination.

5. Optimize your pages to download quickly. Avoid using excessively large images (both in terms of memory size and actual on-screen size). Images which are too large will slow download time of your page, often look bad and are usually unnecessary.

6. Don't make your pages any longer than they need to be. Pages that scroll down forever can be tiresome and, unless they're well written, keeping your visitor's interest is difficult. Be sure that you NEED everything on page. It's worth critically examining contents of a page, sentence by sentence, and ask yourself which stuff is really necessary and which stuff can be done without.

7. Don't be afraid of empty space. Don't clutter up your page with loads of 'stuff'. If it's not essential leave it out. You can draw attention to important things by giving them space to breath rather than making them big or loud.

8. Be sure to put a link to your home page on every page of your site. Links marked 'Back' are no good to people who've arrived directly onto one of your pages from a search engine.

9. Include your contact information (company name, address, link to contact page and perhaps even tel./fax. numbers) at bottom of each page of your site. This will save visitors having to search for it, and it will reassure them that you're a real and credible business.

10. Don't put a graphic counter on your page. People will not buy from a site that has something like "Visitors since 1998: 00001471" in a glaring graphic at bottom of page. Just don't do it. You'll have all statistics you need about your visitors from your webhost (or third-party stats services like sitemeter.com).

The answer is that from a tax point of view, it is advantageous to trade through a limited company as long as income is drawn from company by owners as dividends from their shares and amount of dividends drawn is restricted below 40% band rate (i.e. œ31,063 for tax year 2002/03). That way, owners have no further personal tax ("income tax") to pay. Moreover, dividends are not subject to national insurance contributions. This is excellent news of course. But, if dividend income falls within higher rate bracket of income tax (i.e. above œ34,515), they will be taxed at 22.5% on excess, which of course will increase tax burden. The company profits are subject to corporation tax rates. Those are lower than income tax rates.

The most catastrophic scenario is when director takes his reward from company as salary. Then his/her salary is taxed at income tax rates (like a sole trader's income). That is because, unlike sole traders, tax system treats companies as separate from their owners because a company is a separate legal entity. The problem is that income taxes are higher than corporation tax rates. On top of that, they will be subject to employee and employer national insurance contributions, which of course increase tax burden and render his position worse than even an unincorporated business ("sole trader"), because NIC Class 1 on payroll are higher than NIC Class 2 paid by self employed.

In contrast, a self employed person ("sole trader") is taxed at income tax rates on profits from his business, which are added to his other sources of income. As it has already been mentioned, income tax rates are overall higher than corporation tax rates. On top of income tax, national insurance contributions class 4 are payable on business profits within a specified band (7% on profits between œ4,615and œ30,420). National insurance contributions Class 2 are also paid by self-employed people, although those are lower than those payable by company directors on their salaries.

To illustrate above, let's take a simple example. We have a limited company and a sole trader. They both make œ60,000 profits each in tax year 2002/03. We assume that company director takes a salary equal to amount of his personal allowances (untaxed income) of œ4,615 and balance as dividends. The company will pay corporation tax at 19% equal to œ10,523 and nothing else. The sole trader will pay income tax œ16,542, National insurance Class 2 œ104 and National insurance Class 4 œ1,806. Total œ18,452. The bottom line is that person that has incorporated his business into a limited company will make a tax saving of œ7,929 compared to a sole trader! Isn't that fantastic?

Somebody might be wondering: why is this entire happening? The official explanation is that, this government, to help economy grow, encourages people to leave as much profits within their businesses to be reinvested, instead of being taken out and spent.