When thinking about your business website design, extra attention should be paid to every detail to make sure it performs well to serve its purpose. Here are five vitally important rules of thumb to observe to make sure that your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you first arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Don’t include too many banners

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Make sure your site navigation is intuitive

Your navigation menu should mimic what your site visitors have used many times before. Make it evident that your links to other pages are just that; they should be like directional sign posts on a highway. If you insist upon an animated, dynamic menu or a multi-level dropdown, also provide a tradition, text-based static menu in one of the traditional menu locations, such as along the left panel of the site. Besides, the static menu will contribute toward your search engine optimization efforts.

4) Provide a clear indication of where the user is

If your site is well designed, users will easily flow from one page to another. However, along the way, they may feel like returning to a previously visited page to read it more carefully, to remind themselves of details or to compare one set of features to another. Provide a way for them to retrace their steps or to know how to get from “point g” back to “point c.” Using a breadcrumb trail serves this purpose very nicely.

5) Use audio only very cautiously

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some sound looping on and on at your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure the visitors have some control — volume or muting controls would work fine.

Your http://www.99sites.us/>Internet business will benefit from attention to details such as these.