At the end of the day, what do you want from a site?

Presumably, you wither want people to enjoy using your site and come back, or you actually want them to learn about you or your company or your interest or even buy things from your site or subscribe to you?

Your aim should therefore to be keep things fast loading, to prevent visitors being tired of waiting for pictures to load, as compatible with as many web browsers as possible so that it looks good no matter how they look at it.

Keeping pages well laid out so that it is easy to read and for people to get to where you want them to be - to a product, the correct details or to a subscription etc. is central to give the response you require.

Getting visitors can be tricky, keeping them is therefore vital!

End user feedback!
Getting feedback on a site's usability from someone not actually taking part in the production of the site is a good idea.

When involved in the production of the site, you will know how to navigate through the pages and what you are trying to achieve from the site. However, if the same cannot be said for the visitor then you are not going to be successful in turning visitors into customers (or repeat visitors). Get friends, relatives or colleagues from other companies to give feedback OR specifically ask for this on your web pages - people will only be too pleased to let you have their opinions!

Speed of loading
In general, I would advise you make the site as fast to load as possible for the given information.

What is this down to?
How much information do you have on the page that is loading - text and pictures
Are you using efficient coding for the site - not nesting tables too deeply etc..

Try to keep pages below 75K including picture size - so that is images plus the page.

Ease of use of the site
There are several points which make for a site which is easy to use:

Navigation:
a) How easily can a customer / visitor find their way around?
b) How quickly you can get the information you require?

Contact How easy are you to contact? - If they just want to speak with you, they should be able to do this either from the first page they enter your site at or within one or two clicks. If they cannot, then why not?

What reason should there be for a customer not to be able to call you or at least respond to you? If you have achieved the desired feel good factor then why not make it as easy as possible to get them in touch with you.

So ask yourself 'How easily can customers respond?'.

Other factors:
Is the information on the site accurate - references / prices / pictures - are they all kept up-to-date?

Graphic design -Or how nice is the site to look at? This one is probably lower down the list than you, might have expected. In my opinion I would rather have a well formatted, fast moving web site rather than an all graphic job that is slow to use.

However, a nice looking site need not be slow to load. There are techniques you can use when producing a page that will keep it fast whilst it looks graphically rich. This will be covered in future additions to this section.