“Invest in land..they aren't making any more of it"

Those real estate axioms are well known and are even truer today than ever. But they also are applicable to your website.

We hear and read every day how our websites are competing with millions of others in great race to be found online. We have to first work, work and work some more to get our piece of "web real estate" in a position to be found through search engine management and placement. We secure as many quality links as we can get. We meticulously research our ultimate key word phrases and then pay for best position. All of this just to get your website on screen in front of a potential customer.

Once customer is looking at your page, you have just seconds to capture enough of her attention to keep her there a few more seconds, then a minute, maybe two or three minutes. Long enough to read your information and then gain enough confidence in you, who you are, and what you are offering to actually place an order or seek more information.

Know what odds of all that coming together are?

Ever hear of lottery?

So what does all this have to do with web page real estate?

When your landing page pops up on viewer's monitor, what do they see? Without scrolling down page, without clicking on any links, what is immediately visible? This initial space, considering a typical browser occupies about one inch at top can make or break your goal of getting them to hang around long enough to find out what your site is all about.

Rather than give a lengthy dissertation on web design I have broken it down into following points:

Keep your navigation bars either at top or left of page (a recent tip I heard is: by putting nav bar on right of screen it appears below your site content in html code and therefore will be read by SE spiders last). You can clearly see my navigation bar on left of every page at http://www.007workfromhome.com

Have your navigation bars visible on every page unless its a sales page, in which case you don't want them to go anywhere else.

Divide your navigation bar into related groups of links for easier navigation.

Have you company name and logo in top left or top middle of page.

Keep theme of your site standard throughout. Don't use different fonts on different pages or mix fonts on same page without a good reason for doing so. A constant theme also includes color of unvisited, active and visited links.

Keep your use of colors to no more than about 5-7 different colors per page (less if you can).