This article is aimed at the design for people making their first visit to your site. If you do not get it right then people will leave and not come back. This will mean you will be losing a lot of potential customers through bad design and set up. If you get it right people will stay.

1. Make sure it loads quickly

There are lots of things that need to be considered here to make sure this happens. Firstly you do not want to have lots of large files on your home page that take a long time to load up. These can be things like images or flash files. In addition to this you need to make sure you have a really high quality hosting company. A poor hosting company can cause your website to run more slowly and this will cause you more problems than the money you save.

2. Don't have a landing page

There are many websites you there that have a completely pointless landing page that you need to go through to get to the content. Usually these have some form of flash animation on them that takes time to load up. Many people are impatient and will not bother to wait for this and will drop off before getting to your site. Also this is one of the worst things you can do for SEO and we would not recommend it.

3. Don't use annoying gimmicks

We have all been on those websites that have music playing that we just want to turn off or really annoying flashing images. All these do is put people off and distract them from your content. In the worst case scenario people will leave as quickly as they arrive and not look at anything you have to say. Those who do persevere will find it much harder to get the message as they are continually distracted.

4. Consistent Design

There are websites that change their design from page to page. Although this may be great from a graphic design point of view it is not useful for visitors. The main reason is that it causes confusion. If they click on a link and the page looks different they will think they have gone to another site. If your visitors don't know where they are there is a high chance they won't be buying anything from you.

5. Make you Navigation easy

There are lots of sites that have confusing navigation systems where the menu bar changes from page to page. All this succeeds in doing is making people feel lost. Everything must be consistent from page to page and they should always be able to find the home page. Remember the more lost people are the more annoyed they will get. This means they will be likely to leave and go somewhere else that is easier to understand.

The above tips are simply the basics of web design and there are a lot of other things you need to take into account. Make sure it is easy to use and you would be impressed by it if you were looking to buy.