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.

First, aim for consistency, and usability above all else. Yes, we know splashing colors around is fun. So is putting in a jillion different types of interactive media. Ultimately, every single widget you add does one thing to your site: Makes it slow.

Building off of a consistent color scheme, make sure the theme and layout are consistent throughout your site. It’s a part of your image, and it’s a part of what people will remember about your site. Put the navigational tools in the same place on every page, and consider using server side includes to make sure that they’re present on all pages.

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.

Because content is king, invest early on in tools that make updating and maintaining your content easy, whether it’s as simple as a Wordpress blog, or a full on content management system like DruPaul. Use cascading style sheets (yes, they’re a pain to set up), because they make changing the look of your site a lot easier down the road. Most of those sites that look like they date back to ancient medieval times do so because changing them is a hideous amount of work.

Focus on your content; it’s why people are coming to your site. Focus on navigability; a good index and clearly stated intentions will do wonders for repeat visitors, and make it likelier that you’ll get repeat visitors. When writing content, avoid jargon, and speak in nice, clear sentences. Sure, you can say that the CSS manifold space explificates the eigenstat of the user interface experience but if your eyes glazed over on that, imagine how a whole site of that would read.

Maximize your audience potential. Focus on clarity of communication above all else, and focus on human readable web pages. A lot of internet sites focus on Search Engine Optimization to the extent that while web spiders get lured in, human readers hit the back button fast. It’s your information that’s pulling people in and making them read the site. Cater to that. Lastly, update, update, update. Remember the mention of a content management system? The purpose of that is to make sure that you can update the site painlessly and easily, and give people a reason to come back. Always be on the look out for a new informational value add for your site which is one of the top web marketing strategies.