12 Essential Tips to a Professional Business Website

1. Choose a big enough font size. A size 12 is good for easy readability.

2. Maintain a consistent look on your pages. Use the same fonts, navigation bar, general layout, colour scheme, etc. You want to create a "congruous" experience for your visitor by being consistent.

3. Break the content of your landing webpage into more than one table. Many make the mistake of putting all their content into one table. This may take forever to load.

Try putting just your headlines into a separate table right on the top, with the rest of your content in a second table that follows. So when your visitor arrives on the landing page, the table with the headlines will come on first.

Note that this trick does not reduce the size of your file as a whole or make your entire sales content load faster. It just creates the illusion of this happening. Your visitor can at least take a couple of seconds to read the first table of headlines while the second content-rich table loads. After scanning through the top headlines, the second table is ready for him or her to continue reading.

4. It is preferable to have a white or light coloured background. Black text on such a background stands out better.

5. Have lots of white space on your sales letter. Don't clutter up your page with too much information and images. You want your pages to go easy on the eyes.

6. Do not have too many unnecessary graphics on your website. This is especially if their file sizes are too big. You don't want to risk losing a potential but impatient visitor to your website. Use image attributes, like alternate tags as well as width and height, to help resolve this issue.

7. Don't "bold" large chunks of your text. Bold and italic should be used for highlighting and for drawing special attention.

8. Do not underline text that does not point to a link. It can be misleading to your visitor who may wonder why the link is broken or not working.

9. Use the standard blue underlined link look. Avoid changing the link colour. Don't introduce confusion to your online visitors!

10. It is useful to include links back to your home page on all your pages. Your first time visitor may have arrived at one of your sub-pages, other than your home page. Make it easy for them to link back to your all important sales page (home page).

11. Always check to ensure that you have no broken or outdated links. Get your friends to feedback to you when they should discover any one of these and make amendments immediately.

12. Don't put "under construction" signs on a page. If it's not finished, do not publicise it or make it accessible.

Evelyn Lim is the publisher of the weekly newsletter "Mapping You to Success". She aims to equip her readers with skills to acquire multiple sources of online income. To subscribe to her newsletter, please visit http://www.e-BizMap.com. Or visit her blog "Online Home Business Journals from Singapore" at http://www.EvelynLim.com for more information.