Web design is a critical aspect of all Internet marketing efforts. And naturally so. After all, your website is the only way that visitors make an assessment of you. A shoddy, poorly designed website will showcase you as unprofessional and lax - not very encouraging for your business procurement efforts.

Having said that, creating flashy websites with heavy graphics is also no good. While such websites may be a 'designers delight', they may do more harm than good while marketing on the web.

Confused?? Don't be. Let's see what a good marketing website should employ in its design.

The basic principle of good design is to put yourself in the visitors shoes. Do NOT go for what appeals to your designer's eye necessarily; instead understand what your visitor would like.

The average visitor uses a dial-up connection to access the WWW. Considering this, it would be wise to design your websites to load sufficiently fast on a 56kpbs or even a 28k connection. By fast I mean that it should take no longer than 20-30 seconds to download your web page completely at this speed. Obviously, optimizing your website for a broadband connection doesn't make much sense unless your business profile is specifically targeted at such users.

Again… don't fall into the trap of a designer's delight. If they have it their way, you'll end up having a hugely flashy website showcasing all designing skills such as animations, flash inserts and heavy graphics. Designers, and often website owners, forget that the visitor to your website wants information and is not there to provide you medals for your design capability.

Your design should only support the information that you are providing and not the other way round.

Your content should be strategically located on your web page. The design should be such that it makes the visitor 'want' to read your content. If your content is long then design can be skillfully used to break the content suitably to maintain visitor interest.

Do not design websites using Search Engine 'non-friendly' tools such as frames and Flash. Keep in mind the 'dumbness' of the Search Engine spiders while designing. Even if you are not going to depend much on Search Engines as a matter of strategy, it really does no harm to get FREE bonus traffic through them.

Use the guides listed above and look to develop a cool, crisp design.