- Give Priority to the Website User's Needs design for the users of the website and see things from a visitor's perspective while designing.
- Use Clear, Maintainable and Easy Navigation so the website is easy to use for both the visitor and webmaster.
- Clean and Consistent Layout Design with lots of white space for readability.
- Design for all Screen Resolutions - Design your website in such a way that it looks inviting to everyone.
- Ensure Cross Browser Compatibility - Design your website in such a way that it is usable by everyone.
- Program using pure CSS for optimum accessibility and reusability. CSS considerably reduces file size apart from giving greater control over the look of your website.
- Optimize Load Time: Make sure your load time is low and test for your website's performance often. For this you must:
- Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts: They hugely increase your file size.
- Optimize your HTML & script code: Make sure that your site doesn't have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
- Use Server Side Include (SSI) files wherever possible. Includes once called from the web server reside in its cache so on subsequent requests they load faster.
- Use Server and Client caching of your web page static content (Images, JS, CSS and HTML files).
- Set Expires Header - The optimal expiry time for your static content is 'more than 7 days'.
- Minify CSS and JS code - remove all spaces, comments and line breaks from your CSS and javascript files.
- Ensure a Scalable and Reliable Website - Get a reliable web host and make sure the website design allows for future enhancements.
- Test Early Test Often (TETO)