Keep it simple - you don't want to spend more time on your website than you spend on the rest of your business, so finding ways to make working on your website easier is extremely important. Dynamic webpages make updating and adding new products to your site simple - see creating a dynamic website.

Layout of your site - While content is important, the way you present your content is equally important. Most people browse the internet by "scanning" pages rather than reading large blocks of text. There is a reason that most webpages have a top header with links on the top or left side - these are the easiest layouts to read and understand. Also, smaller paragraphs are more likely to be read than longer paragraphs. Think about how you interact with a webpage - if you open a page and it's nothing but paragraph after paragraph, do you read it? Or do you click back and find a different website?

Use good SEO tactics - items such as meta tags for your pages and images are essential for ranking well with search engines. SEO is such a vast topic that I won't go into too much information here (click to find out more about SEO), but there are two types of SEO tactics:

• black hat techniques (which you should NEVER incorporate into your site)
• white hat techniques (such as meta tags and link building).

Basically, white hat techniques are approved by search engines and black hat techniques are not. White hat techniques will help you rise in rankings naturally without risk of penalty or removal from a search engine; black hat techniques (such as keyword stuffing, spamdexing and redirects designed to trick search engines) will eventually be discovered and your site will be penalized. If you hire an SEO for your website, be aware that some SEO "professionals" will incorporate black hat tactics - don't walk, run from them and find an SEO professional that will not compromise your website for quick results.

Things that can send visitors scurrying back to Google to find a different website:

Some people find themselves in the unending endeavor to be unique (I'm talking to the artists here!), but we have to find a balance between unique and obstructive. Moving the navigation to a completely different area on some pages is just rude (sorry, but it is). Likewise, inconsistent themes and colors can give people the impression that they have left your website. If you must have a different header for some pages, make sure the headers are visually consistent so that visitors know that they have not been sent to a different website.

• Now for my favorite... flash intros. Flash intros can be unique, and they can also be interesting, but most people don't even bother watching them (I know, I'm guilty of hitting the skip intro button EVERY time). If you must have a flash intro, be kind and provide a skip intro (by the way, the sites that don't have the skip intro are the sites that I never see, because I hit the back button and forget that I was ever on that website). Another thing to keep in mind when using flash - it can seriously inflate the size of your webpage. There are still a lot of people using dial-up and dsl, so keep them in mind when building your site.
  
  
• Music starting up on site load :( This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but I seriously hate having music start when I open a site. When I'm browsing the internet, I usually have my own music playing. Then I click on a site that starts screeching some horrible song at me, and after desperately trying to find the off button, I hit the back button because I can't stand it anymore and I no longer care to see what that website has to offer.
  
  
• Before you unleash your masterpiece to the world, make sure it works! Broken links and code that doesn't work is a pain for everyone involved. It's a pain for the webmaster (finding an error in your coding can be daunting), and it's a pain for your visitors. Have you ever found an interesting-looking page, but when you clicked on it you got a 404 error - sucked, didn't it? Don't wait for a visitor to "let you know" that a link didn't work, because they rarely do. Go through your website and click through every link on every page to make sure it works. Also, when you work with PHP sessions, you have to clear your cache before you check your pages; otherwise things will work for you because a session is in place, but your visitors will get errors and partial pages. Click for more about PHP and dynamic webpages.
  
  

Art websites and gallery based sites. Art and gallery based sites depend on good layout, great pictures, the right amount of information, and usability. See the Creating an Art Website article for more information, such as taking better pictures of your work and the appropriate information to include for your artworks.