There is much to discuss when it comes to web sites, but this article will consider some basic ideas for your web site's design.

Ask three people for their Internet design opinions and you'll get three different answers. One thing's for sure, though:

That's right, Keep It Simple Stupid. :-)

Web sites should have a clean, simple look with easy navigation and a logical layout. Nothing turns a visitor away quicker than being confused. If your visitors can't find what they're looking for within a few seconds, they'll click to another site and never return to yours.

Design Considerations

Here are some things to keep in mind:

Load Time -- Internet users are impatient. If it takes too long for your web pages to load, they'll go somewhere else. And, yes, 10 seconds is long!

Graphics -- Too many graphics on your web sites also contribute to slow load times. Some people turn off display of graphics in their browsers, which means you need to have ALT tags to tell them what graphic is about.

In addition, reduce size of your graphics so that your web pages load quicker by using one of free image reducers available on Internet.

These pages, although optimized for different search engines, often turn out to be pretty similar to each other. The search engines now have ability to detect when a site has created such similar looking pages and are penalizing or even banning such sites. In order to prevent your site from being penalized for spamming, you need to prevent search engine spiders from indexing pages which are not meant for it, i.e. you need to prevent AltaVista from indexing pages meant for Google and vice-versa. The best way to do that is to use a robots.txt file.

You should create a robots.txt file using a text editor like Windows Notepad. Don't use your word processor to create such a file.

Here is basic syntax of robots.txt file:

User-Agent: [Spider Name] Disallow: [File Name]

For instance, to tell AltaVista's spider, Scooter, not to spider file named myfile1.html residing in root directory of server, you would write

User-Agent: Scooter Disallow: /myfile1.html

To tell Google's spider, called Googlebot, not to spider files myfile2.html and myfile3.html, you would write

User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /myfile2.html Disallow: /myfile3.html

You can, of course, put multiple User-Agent statements in same robots.txt file. Hence, to tell AltaVista not to spider file named myfile1.html, and to tell Google not to spider files myfile2.html and myfile3.html, you would write

User-Agent: Scooter Disallow: /myfile1.html

User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /myfile2.html Disallow: /myfile3.html

If you want to prevent all robots from spidering file named myfile4.html, you can use * wildcard character in User-Agent line, i.e. you would write

User-Agent: * Disallow: /myfile4.html

However, you cannot use wildcard character in Disallow line.

Once you have created robots.txt file, you should upload it to root directory of your domain. Uploading it to any sub-directory won't work - robots.txt file needs to be in root directory.

I won't discuss syntax and structure of robots.txt file any further - you can get complete specifications from here.