Your business is represented to the world online through your website. It's a brochure that any potential customer, anywhere and at any time can view and decide whether your company is the right one for them. Therefore it is of the upmost importance that your web site practices good web design techniques which will enable your company's site to get the maximum amount of traffic, therefore making the maximum amount of profit.

The most important thing to consider on the World Wide Web is that your website reaches certain web standards. These are set out at www.w3.org, here you can check your web site with just a few mouse clicks and it will direct you on whether these standards are being met and, if not, how to change your web site to do so. Another thing to consider is cross-browser compatibility. You're website may look fantastic in Internet Explorer but if it breaks up in Firefox or Safari you WILL lose visitors. As I write this around 55% of people worldwide use Internet Explorer so that's 45 people out of every one hundred that visit your site using a different browser so cross-browser support MUST be considered.

Ensure your navigation is as easy as possible, make sure it is clear and concise and that at any point of a visitors browsing they know where they are and how to get back to where they came from. If a visitor experiences any confusion in any way they WILL leave.

Text paragraphs should always be kept at reasonable lengths. If a block of text appears to be too big it can deter some a lot of visitors from reading your content. If you have got a lot of content to go on a page you should always try and split them into small text blocks, this way visitors will be able to pick out what they need to know a lot easier and they will not feel as though they are reading an essay.

If you are using any images, make sure they are optimized to the smallest possible size and try and reduce the number per page. Images will slow the loading of a website down and the majority of the time they aren't really necessary.

Stay away from using any sort of scripting languages throughout your website for visual images/effects. Scripting can slow down the loading time of a page on your website and even cause the browsers, in some cases, to crash. If you really have to use them, export the code to a different page and reference it when needed. Some browsers aren't compatible with some scripts so I would advise not using them at all unless it is to handle and manipulate data.

Lastly, style all your pages with CSS, this reduces the amount of code on your web pages enabling them to load quicker and it also saves you a lot of time when re-styling or adjusting the web site in the future.