Our initial judgement of a brick-and-mortar business is based on its location and appearance.  The internet model removes the brick-and-mortar expense from the equation.  A web visitor doesn't know if your business is based in a high-rise office suite or in a garage.   Instead, a potential customer's first impression of your business is based on your web design.

As an end-user, it's easy to discern which internet sites are professionally designed.  But for your own site, it can be tempting to create a jumbled mass of technical features.  Consider the following points when you start designing your site:

There is a limited amount of real estate on your browser.  Use every sentence, graphic, and button judiciously.  Keep in mind that white-space is your friend.

Break up your design into clean, geographic sections.  Define the placement of each section by borders or colors.  Overlapping sections also provides visual interest.  Note the secondary menu on this page overlaps three sections.

There are several internet browsers and each version of each browser has its own idiosyncrosies (read "Browser Wars - What Went Wrong?").  In an ideal world, your web site would work equally well on each browser, guaranteeing 100% penetration.  But the additional development and maintenance costs makes this an unrealistic luxury for most businesses.  Microsoft Explorer is by far the dominant browser, holding over 96% market share.  So obviously, ensure that your site works on Microsoft Explorer.

There's the additional problem that each browser release supports improved interface features.  The client browser/version can be identified programatically and software can make the necessary accomodations to remain downward compatible.  But again, development and maintenance costs are impacted.  If you can't afford these costs, there's no choice but to draw a line in the sand concerning which features, such as Cascading Style Sheets, your site will support.  Older browsers that don't support these features will display your site's pages improperly.  Blooberry.com has a nice browser version/feature support breakdown.

If you are lucky enough to have a high-speed internet connection, it's easy to get out of touch with performance experienced by the rest of the internet world.  The transfer of data takes time.  Keep the size of your files to a minimum.  Multi-media presentations such as Shockwave or Flash Animation can add pizzazz to a web site.  But they also require a lot of bandwidth.  A simple option such as "Skip Intro" gives your site the best of both worlds.  Sluggish response time is the major turn-off to potential customers. 

Make sure your web site is designed to accommodate multiple monitor resolutions.  A well-built web page will resize to the width of your browser.  Test this by adjusting your browser width.  When the browser is widened, the content should expand.  When it's narrowed, the content should compress. 

Read up on the psychology of color from sites such as Pantone.  The color scheme of your web site should include a primary and secondary color.  Remember that white is a good, safe color to use throughout your site.

There are 216 safe colors that display universally on different browsers and operating systems.  The drawback to this palette is that it limits the look and feel of a site.  Additionally, the over-saturation of many of the colors causes eye strain.  Interspacing each line of color with a dark color can tone down the safe colors.  However, since most users today have at least a 16 bit (65,000 colors) screen resolution, the 16 bit color model is acceptable.  Screens that don't support a color will display the closest match.  No matter which color model you use, every monitor has a color bias.  Some monitors have a cool, bluish hue and others have a warm, reddish hue.

Frames are an HTML feature that logically divide web pages into sections.  Frames should be architected carefully.  A customer entering your site via a search engine can land on a page that doesn't include the supporting menu frame.  Potential customers can be lost if they are unable to navigate through your site.  Ensure every frame page contains an easily recognizeable link to your home page.

Take advantage of the flexible presentational abilities of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).  Style sheets also have maintentance benefits.  A change to a style sheet property can update multiple pages, reducing ongoing maintenance efforts.

Customers appreciate helpful links to other sites.  But internet sites are very fluid.  Today's helpful link can quickly become broken, decayed, and rotten.  Excessive link-rot will reflect poorly on your site.  If you include links, keep them current.

Gain an understanding of copyright laws.  Contrary to popular opinion, copyright is implicit.  Text and images have automatic copyright protection even if they don't display a copyright notice.  You can generally link to pages of other sites (see "Don't Link to Us" for a list of companies that prohibit links), but you cannot use any of their content as your own.

Monitor the performance and availability of your Host Service Provider at different times of the day and night.  All host servers will experience periodic glitches.  But if service levels experience excessive downward spikes, it's time to move your web site to another host.