Designing your website for the best performance is the number one goal for any webmaster when it comes to website design. A very common mistake that is made when designing a web site is the use of large and heavy files such as graphics that require allot of bandwidth to load and even more patience from the visitor to actually view your website.

Here are some really quick tips to help you with your website design.

1) Leave the splash pages for movies and advertisements.

These are fancy pages you will see when you click on to a link to visit a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like welcome or click here to enter. They are pages with no purpose, and serves to discourage uses from fully utilizing the actual purpose of the website due to their slow loading time. This page serves a good purpose to entertain but if website conversion is your goal, it can be a big barrier for you to achieve your goals.

It can also be very damaging to your home page listings with the free search engines as the content is usually limited which affects your indexing. The only time I have seen this used effectively is with PPC marketing .

Of course a landing page is a different senario completely and we will discuss this tactic later.

2) To many banners will blind your visitor "DO NOT" over use banner advertisements

The rule of thumb for advertising banners is that they should be displayed on the top section of a web page, and with most cases they usually are right at the top as well being placed in the footer of the page as well. The unfortunate part about this is the the tactic is sound but alot of webmasters place two or three banners at a time in this area which actually forces the visitor to leave.

Even the newest internet user has trained themselves to ignore banner ads so placing them would only waste precious real estate space. There is a better way to add value to your site instead of using banner ads you could consider giving them useful information and then add your affiliate links into the text so that they would seem natural to the content and not out of place.

But if you have to use a banner make sure it is only one and very relevant to the page content to have any chance of getting your visitor to click on it.

3) Always use a simple page navigation system menu.

Navigation must be simple to follow so much so that a small child can use. Do not use any form of menus that will complicate users, drop downs and multi-tiers are not a good idea unless they are in CSS not javascript. Keep your important topics as the main navigation buttons on your site. make sure you link from text within your site to sub pages.

Remember, if users find it hard to navigate, and can't find what they are searching for within 3 clicks they will leave very soon after landing on your home page. Ensuring that you have a sitemap will help them find what they want and should be factored in to the website design right from the start. This can be placed at the top navigation of the page or into the footer.

4) Make it easy for the user to identify where they are on your website.

When visitors are interested in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. With a sitemap, they can directly head to the information they are looking for. You can get this done easily by making sure that every page has its own title and each links that has been visited must be visible in different colors form the ones that are fresh. If you create any form of confusion, you will drive the visitors away.

5) Avoid using audio sound on your site web.

If you want your visitors to stay a long time and read the contents, do not irritate em with your audio. Sound files should be used sparingly. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it - volume or muting controls would work fine. If you wish for the visitors to return to your site make sure the audio file does not play again once is enough, learn to apply all these website design rules and you can reap the benefits of long term traffic.

If this all seems to much for you and you would like a simple solution to starting your own web business the maybe you should have a look at my hub on Blinkweb it is free to start and packed full of information from SEO experts Brad and Matt Callen.

If your not sure what Blinkweb is you can check it out on my Blinkweb Hub. Get your free domain name today just register for Blinkweb at no cost then once in the members area you can have access to get a FREE DOMAIN from Blinkweb it really is that easy to do.

Have you guys ever heard about Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins? These are the guys behind Stompernet and they are doing something pretty amazing at the moment.

These guys usually sell their stuff like a stompernet membership for $800 a month, so this is why I think they have lost there minds.

You can actually get Stomping The Search Engines 2 Premium Seo study course FOR FREE yep you heard me Free and all you do is pay for the shipping and handling to get it.

This is not an Audio course but a full DVD watch and learn course that from all accounts has left nothing unturned. With many of the top internet gurus being a member of stompernet this is your chance to get a foot in the door for a very small cost.

Part of the deal is that you subscribe to their new magazine called "The Net Effect" with the first month being free. If there is anything you ever need to know about SEO for your website you should consider checking this out. And yes there probably is a catch further down the line but you can always opt out if you dont like it.

I am not going to go on about it as I have already taken up the offer so I will see you at the top of the search engines take 5 minutes of your time right now and just check out the site and watch the video that will cost you nothing, but maybe it could change your life and the way you market your site.

Stompernet Free Offer

One of the many mistakes that most online business owners make before ever creating there web site is this.

Failure To Research Their Market

Yes that is right they poor thousands of dollars and their very valuable time into a product that they wish to sell only to find that no one is searching for the keywords they have structured there web site around.

Does that sound like you?

Finding The "Right Niche" For Your Product Or Service

There are many tools and utilities you can use online to find out what your would be customers are searching for. This information is going to guide you when you are deciding on a domain name, keywords and the actual theme of your website.

And as I have said this very important factor of your online business is where many people fail to capture the true potential of their website. It is useless to you and the search engines to register a domain name just because you like the sound of it and that has no traffic value at all. Unless of course you are only going to be using ppc to market your website, this can get very expensive and cut into your profits.

What You Need To Do...

Before deciding on domain name and keywords and even in some cases the product or service name you need to visit Google Keyword Tools here you will have two options to research your market place, using either keyword phrases that you type in or the tactic I use is to find the top ranking website in Google and then use their url to find the keywords in that market. After all the no1 ranked website is already generating traffic and has done allot of the work for you.

After you have completed you intial research you should have a list of keywords that you can now work with to create your domain name, themed pages using the keywords and the most important your product or service name.

This is just one of the many tools and resources that I will be listing in the Hub. Here some other topics that i will be covering in the comming weeks.

More Keyword Tools and Utilities

And the end of these tutorials on marketing and promoting your website you will be able to create a website from scratch find content, be able to market your site in the free search engines and virtually dominate any niche within months of entering it.

And for anyone who is doubting this you can type in the seacrh term "essential sugar" and you wll find my site listed in position #1 and #2 out of 34,700,000 results on google.