For many, this is the first step, however, if time is spent on deciding on the purpose of your website, ideas about it's appearance could be revised.

There are many impressive website designs, but they may not fit your own business. Your design should be subtle, yet unique.

A common mistake is to fill the design with vivid colour which overwhelms the visitor and makes it more difficult to draw his eye to items of interest. An even worse mistake is to create a first page that consists of nothing but a fancy graphic. Search engines and visitors hate these.

A space of approximately 700 x 350 pixels is the average visitor's screen 'real estate'. You must get your message acoss in that small space.

Navigation is a critical. It must be explanatory, logical and simple. Labyrinthine, arcane and ambiguous navigation is the death of many websites.

Many websites use sophisticated, drop-down/fold out menus that don't demonstrate which sections will expand and don't tell the visitor which pages he has been to and those which he has yet to visit.