When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make a point it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make a point your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you gain a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In point of fact, it’s just that — jolly vases without any real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real property. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they prefer to buy rather than being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t process to navigate, they’ll leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you’ll prefer to make sure they know which part of the site it’s in at that moment. That way, they’ll be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay months at your site, reading your content, you’ll want to make a point they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on about your website. If you insist on adding audio, make a point they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

Normally, if you want to have professional designers custom build your site, you must be prepared to dish out at least a few hundred dollars. All this can change if you know where to find the best deals, the best designs for the lowest price. Here’s a rough guide:

First, you must understand that it’s a rip off to get companies to design websites for you. Have you ever seen those advertisements in newspaper classified ad sections that offer a 5-page website at $500? These companies are established companies with physical locations, therefore they’ve to increase the amount they charge to pay off some overheads: office rent, designer’s wages, advertising costs and so on.

Therefore, it would be wise to find freelance designers who work from home. These people are often working from home so they don’t have a high operation cost like that of a company. On the other hand, they will be able to design images with quality similar to those of designers from big companies, so it’s a “no-brainer” choice.

However, choose freelancers with care. The best way to do this would be to go to elance.com. There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project, so you’ll surely get the best deal. On top of that, you’ll be able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured.

Another route you are able to take is to design your website yourself. Think about it, if you only need 5 simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it? Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. You’ll be able to design your own sites even if you don’t know a single line of HTML code with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on.

Your website is the hub of your online business; it’s the virtual representation of your company whether your company exists physically or not. When you’re doing business online, people cannot see you physically like how they could if they were dealing with an offline company. Hence, people do judge you by your covers. This is where a good design comes in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they’re dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professionally, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

Similarly, the same case is with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you’re not professional and you don’t care for quality.

On the opposite, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are giving your visitors the perception that you’ve given meticulous attention to every detail and you care about professionalism. You’re organised, focused and you really mean business.

On the other hand, you should also have anything related your company well designed. From business cards to letterheads to promotional brochures, every little bit matters. This is because as you grow your business, these items become the face of your business. Once again, think of the “salesperson dressed shabbily” anology, and you’ll get my point.

For anything to work well, care must be fancied make firm, workable plans to execute it and as is goes for website designs. With a reasoned website design, you’ll be able to create a site that generates multiple streams of revenue for you. In fact, may websites turn into online wasteland because it’s not well planned and do not patten single visitor. Gradually, the webmaster won’t be motivated to update it anymore and it turns into wasted cyberspace.

The crucial point of planning your site is optimizing it for revenue if you prefer to gain any income from the site. Divide your site into major blocks, ordered by themes, and start building new pages and subsections in those blocks. For example, you might have a “food” section, an “accomodation” section and an “entertainment” section for a tourism site. You can then write and publish relevant articles in the respective sections to attract a stream of traffic that comes looking further information.

When you’ve a broader, better-defined scope of themes for your website, you can sell space on your pages to people interested in advertising on your page. You can also earn from programs like Google’s Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing if people surf to those themed pages and click on the ads. For this very reason, the advertisement blocks on your pages need to be relevant to the content, so a themed page fits that criteria perfectly.

As Internet becomes more widespread, advertising on the Internet will bear more results than on magazines or offline media. Hence, start tapping in on this lucrative stream of profit directly!