building a valuable website with great information or unique product is only half of the story of making a website a successful one. The complementary half of it is giving it the appropriate design.

When it comes to gaming sites, since this is a quite competitive market we're dealing with, it's not enough to have a great game platform with lots of useful features, the game and the site it sits in must be attractive. Think of it this way ? ?what you see is what you get?. This is how visitors think and they are right. That's why you have to make your design as attractive as your product is. How do you that? Keep on reading and you'll figure it out.

Put Life in your website design

Use a vibrant layout for your website design. Making this will give your visitors the right impression that your site is not amateurish or spammy, but a professional one. Lots of online games sites, especially the ones that offer games for free, such as free backgammon sites, neglect this important factor and thus loosing numerous of potential users. Get yourself into the users? shoes and then ask yourself ? Do I find this site attractive? Can I trust it?

Don't overload your site with graphics

As much as flash and other graphics can contribute to your site appearance, you should minimize them as much as you can. The reason is simple - too much graphics, flash and scripts increase the size of your file, thus lengthening the loading time of your site. Don't put your visitors? patience into test. There's always someone else's site they can go to.

Design your site for all screen resolutions

Once you done designing your site, the most important thing you need to check, is whether it looks the same in all screen resolutions. If, for example, you run a backgammon site, make sure the images of the board game, the dice and so on look the same in all screen resolutions. If you identify some differences, make the necessary changes. Don't think about the common screen resolution the majority of users use; make your site visible to everyone, no matter what kind of screen resolution they use.

Make your site navigation clear and easy

Make it easy for your visitors to explore your site so they'll be able to find the things they were looking for. If your site offers some games for free and others for money, distinct the two from one another on the navigation bar. Don't force a visitor who looks for some free games to wander around the site, including the section of games for money, until he finds them.

Remember: it's all about games, not ads!

Sure you want to use your game site to make some money from selling ads, especially if your site offers free playing, but you shouldn't push it. Too many banners, textual ads and other forms of online advertisements can harm your website credibility as well as its visual.

No one likes the idea that someone is trying to sell him something, and your users are no different. If you insist on putting ads in your site, use only relevant ads (ads that sell products or services related to your gaming site, such as game consoles, PC games, etc) make them few and please avoid pop up advertisements. They're annoying.