Designing a website without organic search engine optimization (SEO) in mind may lead to lost revenue and added costs. In the business world, every visitor is a potential customer that can increase your profits. If they can't find you, they can't visit you. If your site is not designed to be search engine friendly from the start, only another redesign, with good SEO practices, and more time will help you reach your search engine ranking goal (which is to the top, we suppose).

A webpage with a lot of links and graphics may look impressive, but if your visitors cannot quickly find what they are looking for, they may simply go somewhere else. In addition, multimedia, Flash and otherwise graphic heavy sites can suffer from long download times, testing your visitor's patience. It would be hard to imagine that Craigslist or Google would be more successful with a graphic laden, uber state of the art design. In these cases, less is more, and visitors appreciate that. The product or information that you are providing is the most important asset to your website's success (content is king!), and keep visitors coming back for more.

When choosing fonts for your site, it is better to use sans-serif for general text and sarif fonts for headlines only. Sans-serif fonts are much easier to read on computer monitors. For your website to be accessible to the visually impaired, it is recommended that, as a rule, your font sizes be specified as EM, %, or by general size (e.g. medium, x-large). Choosing font size values with strategic intent will allow the reader to adjust the size of the text to suit their needs while maintaining the design integrity. It is also wise to use standard font families that are preinstalled on most computers, such as Verdana, Geneva, Arial, and Helvetica, or use generic names such as cursive, fantasy, monospace, sans-serif, and serif.

The average adult in the U.S. reads at the 8th-grade level. If your goal is to reach the largest number of viewers, your text should be tailored to meet the reading skill, interest, and patience of your expected average visitor. People tend to scan web pages, so it is important to get to the point early. Keeping your content understandable, short, and focused will please your visitors and result in lower bounce rates.

Websites are viewed with many different browsers. What looks good in the browser you use, may look off in a competing browser. Not only that, different versions of the same browser may alter your design intent. At the very least, a website today should be developed and tested for Internet Explorer and Firefox, which combined hold almost 82% of the market share. Add in Chrome, Safari, and Opera and a minimum of 98.7% of web surfers can enjoy your new site.

Pop-ups are almost always annoying, especially when they occur automatically upon entering a webpage. It usually indicates that the site owner is thinking more about their interests (e.g. click-through ads) rather than the viewers (e.g. actual content!). To the web wise, sites that have something important or valuable to display will not immediately attempt to direct visitors away from it.

To project a professional image, your web page design and layout should be consistent throughout the site. Keeping headers, footers, menus, fonts, colors, and backgrounds relatively the same on each page helps your visitors easily navigate your site through instant familiarity. Since viewers don't always first arrive on your home page, it is important to design each page as a potential landing site with a clear and easy link back to your home page.

Background music or videos that automatically start playing when a web page is loaded may not be appreciated by a large number of visitors. People surf the web from their place of work, the library, and at night when others are sleeping. In these situations, a potential visitor of your site may just hit the back button to stop the noise. If your website truly needs to have music or videos, such as a band or a tutorial site, provide a prominent link or button to turn on the sound or video.

Worldwide, there are five search engines that make up over 99% of all searches of the web. These five are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, and Ask. Google alone holds a market share of over 85% (July 2010). Concentrate on optimizing your website for Google first and follow their SEO guidelines. It can take some time to do it right, but the results are lasting. If you are looking into the services of a professional, make sure they are "White Hat" and do not participate in unethical practices such as link farming or keyword stuffing (see spamdexing). This could lead your site to being penalized or banned from search engines.

Leaving plenty of white space on each web page gives your site a sense of neatness and spaciousness. Information that is packed tightly, using most of the available screen space, can make it hard for your viewers to find and concentrate on the information they are looking for. Think of the pleasant feeling you get from a room in your home that is tidy as opposed to one with clothes, boxes, papers, and dishes scattered about. Hang that jacket up and divide the content into separate pages.