Understand on the front end that your Web site will never truly be finished. It should constantly be tweaked and adjusted to make the user experience better, to respond to new input from the market, to relay new information. But beyond that, there are legitimate reasons your site should never "want" to be finished.

- Sites which are updated often are better indexed by the search engines, leading to higher rankings in the search engines than less frequently updated sites.
- It gives visitors to your site a reason to come back.
- You should consider having either a blog or a "Breaking News" page integrated into your Web site.

Your Web site should be the gateway to your customer service solution. "Relationships have become powerful differentiators. Customers can't tell if your product is better than your competitor's product, but they can tell if they have a better relationship with you than with your competitor." - Steve Yastrow

Use your Web site to enhance customer service. Ideas include:
- Downloadable tech guides
- Instructional videos
- Online chat with CSRs
- Polls, a suggestion box, etc.

If you do not have video on your site now – get it up. Several video content solutions and players are available:
- www.multicastmedia.com
- www.brightcove.com

People would rather watch than read. Use video to engage your customers, educate them and cross sell.

A picture really can be worth a thousand words. If you are selling a product, pictures of it are almost mandatory. But even if your Web site is more information-oriented, often a suitable picture can sum up the mood of the article succinctly, thus putting the reader in the right "frame of mind" to read it. Study after study shows that people looking at a Web page will look at the pictures first. If your pictures are properly formatted and are of a reasonable size, most modern browsers will have no problems. Proper coding ensures that the pictures are not loaded until after the text anyway.

For more than 500 years, we have been reading dark writing on a white page. Why? Because it works. One change from print is that on the screen, many studies suggest a sans serif font is easier to read instead of the recommended serif fonts for print media. Of course, make certain that whatever font you use is large enough to be read. Remember that the population segment over the age of 55 is growing every day on the Internet. Designers are afraid of white space, but it is the white space on the page that gives the text room to breathe, that makes the eye glide on the page and actually makes the text easy to read.

Few people read from a computer screen for fun or relaxation. Copy should help them achieve their purpose in coming to your Web site. Copy needs to be "scannable." Keep your paragraphs to less than four sentences. Maximize the use of lists and bullet points, both of which lead to easy scanning.

For key items, use bold to really make it stand out, but beware of bolding everything. Copy is also the key ingredient to search results. Make sure that all of your copy has been optimized for search results. Additionally, write copy as if you are actually saying it – not like an article or a brochure. Remember that your Web site is the place where you have the opportunity to engage your customer. Write in a conversational tone so that your readers feel like they are having a one-on-one conversation with you. The results can be surprising.

What are your competitors' sites doing right and wrong? Identifying your competitors is always regarded as a high priority for any business. If you are not adding any value to an existing product or service, why would customers switch to your business? If you are providing your product at a lesser cost this should be represented clearly on your site. Looking at competitors' Web sites also gives you a chance to take a step back and put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. What do you like about the competitor's Web site (navigation, clear information, professional feel)? One of the first things I do whenever we begin work on a new client's Web site is to embark on a comprehensive examination of our client's competitors. You will be surprised by what you can learn.

Load time is an important determining factor of how long people stay at your site. Have you ever been to a site where there are so many large graphics on the main page that you are waiting three minutes just for the page to load? Most people get tired of waiting for a site to load after the first minute. Try to keep your load time under three to four seconds. If you have a slow loading page there are several ways to speed it up. Google is now going to take site load time into account for placement related to its paid search program – AdWords.

One of the worst mistakes made on the Web is to build a site and then leave it alone. Keep it fresh. Add new content regularly and try to update your site at least twice a week, if not more. Make sure that your content is something that will make your visitors keep coming back to your site again and again. For example, you could have a blog, a monthly contest, weekly specials or polls. We see many clients making a huge upfront investment to build a great site but are unprepared to continue to make the site great by keeping it fresh.

In the old days, when beginning a site design, we would sit around with our clients and brainstorm ideas about how the site should function and look. We would assume to a large degree that we knew enough about our client's business to be able to predict what the customer would want out of the site. Today, we can no longer assume that we know these answers. With recent advancements in technology, it is easy and inexpensive to really know what your customer wants. In order to improve your site, you must know what users like and dislike about your site. Some tips to do this effectively are:

- Set up monthly polls on your site asking your users what they like and dislike about your site and then use that information to make your site better
- Also make sure that there is an easy way for your visitors to be able to contact you and give you their suggestions
- Feedback from your users is one of the most helpful things you can use to improve your site

Recently, we began to test site design ideas by having site visitors go into test sites and give us feedback on design and functionality. This way, we know what site visitors like and don't like about certain designs and we can make changes before the site is launched, not after.

Before you ever begin working on your web design, make sure that you understand what is the Most Wanted Response (MWR) you want from a site visitor. Identify this in the very beginning and just as importantly, identify how you will measure the MWR going forward. For some sites, it will be about conversions to sales, to others it will be about building an opt-in email database, for still others, it will be about something simple like page views. Most clients will want all of the above, however, it is critical to force the client to rank the #1 most important and desired response. The site should then be designed around facilitating this MWR.

The second rule to effective web design is to Know Your Target. Always start by asking - Who is your target audience? This applies to every single site... ever made... you always need to identify the target audience and decide what is the single most important thing the audience should leave a site knowing. Do not be afraid to develop separate sites to market to different targets and then cross-market the sites. Sometimes dumping everything onto one site is not the best approach. This is especially true for companies that sell different products aimed at different demographics.