You don't have to be an expert at design to follow these simple tips to making your web page more appealing. The first thing people notice when they click into your page are the colors. When putting together your color scheme, make sure it is consistent throughout each page of the website. When deciding on colors, consider how they make you feel. If someone has visited your page, you don't need to go bright, they are already there. Too much color might be overwhelming. Try to keep the colors nice but not forefront over your product. Choose colors that highlight your products, and go along with the theme of what you are selling.

In addition to the colors being consistent, the theme and layout should also remain the same throughout the site. This is part of your image and you want it to be consistent.

Try to avoid creating a web page that people have to download components to view your page. The easier your page is to navigate, the longer people will hang around. This doesn't mean your page has to be boring. There are plug-in's that are common you can use. Some of the more common are Shockwave, Java, and Active X.

OK, now that we've de-cluttered the site, let's look at navigability. Most readers won't scroll past the third screen full of text. So if it's going to be important, put it on top. Use the journalist "inverted pyramid" and start with the most important information at the top and work your way down to the minutia at the bottom. While you're at it, make sure your lovingly search engine optimized content isn't written as gibberish for web spiders, but still makes sense to human beings.

Remember, content is king. It's why people are coming to your web site in the first place, regardless of whether they're a repeat visitor, or a random drive by led in by search engines. Make sure your content is worthwhile, make sure it updates regularly, and remember that people will click on advertising links only if they're interesting in the context of whatever content was there.

In the interests of making your site more easily maintained, use a content management system to control assets; use Cascading Style Sheets (well, the subset that are implemented properly in both IE 7 and Firefox) to keep your formatting separate from your content. That way, if you need to tweak the design, you do so in one file, rather than in 300.

While you're investigating what your site is going to look like, remember that people read at 400 words per minute; they listen at 100 words per minute. Keep this in mind when putting content out - anything that has to be clicked on and listened to is an invitation to use the back button.

If your information is always the same, people won't always come back. Make a point to update your site regularly and let visitors know that you do that. You will be able to keep attention better if people know that they will find new information on subsequent visits.

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Please visit Web Marketing Strategies to discover more techniques to increase traffic to your sites. Trisha Frauenhofer is an online marketing pro who loves sharing her most powerful online secrets