When designing your site the most important thing is to always keep your targeted audience in mind. You should always have a targetted audience and do not be afraid to do a little reasearch on your audience. Your design will focus on your audience and the types of things that the like to look at. There are some general guidlines that all sites should follow though:
- Viewers do not like to wait. Make load time as fast as possible.
- Viewers hate to scroll. limit your pages in length as much as possible.
- Viewers hate to read. Limit the information you give them at the same time. Try splitting it up over multiple pages.
- Viewers hate to be bored. If you have a long load time give them something to do while they wait for your images to load. This really applies to flash animations.
- Viewers hate to search the page. Make your navigation system simple to find and to use.
- Some Viewers hate flashy color and some systems do not display them correctly. Keep your font simple and your colors away from neon.
- Viewers hate broken links. If you do not have a page for them remove the link.
- Viewers hate error messages. If you have one fix it do not leave it just because the page still works.
- Viewers hate pop ups remove them.
- Viewers hate alert windows. They are in most cases pointless do not use them.
- Viewers hate ads. Keep ads to a minimum.
*These are just generalizations and may not apply to all types of pages, but they do to most.