Almost everyone, at some time during their journey to become the next Internet millionaire, has designed (or redesigned) their own website. Some have had shining success, others, miserable failure. In case you are wondering, the latter is much more common.

This is because a true web designer often has a formal education and has spent years refining their skills to learn what works and what doesn’t. You see, there is much more to designing a website than appearance alone. You have to think about factors like usability, conversions and SEO, to name just a few.

If you can afford to hire a professional firm like Wildfire Marketing Group, by all means, do so, but if you need to design your own website because you’re on a budget, or you’re a budding web designer, be prepared for lots of learning and hard work. A comprehensive web design checklist will help to make sure you cover all the details and end up with an outstanding website!

Here are a few of the basics. The more intricate details will require some more research and tools.

1. Appearance

I hate to sound shallow, but looks matter. Over 83% of your potential clients will visit your website before choosing to do business with you, and their impression of your company will be formed in just a few seconds. If you can’t impress them quickly, you’ll probably lose them. If you’re not a “natural” artist, don’t spend a lot of time on this since your goal is to make money with your website. Instead, invest in a quality template and modify it to meet your needs.

2. Speed

People are busy, and when they visit your website, they expect it to open right up. So don’t load it up with tons of bloated graphics, JavaScript and poorly written code. And whatever you do, avoid music or those annoying intro videos. No one cares about them, and most people will either hit the mute button, or even worse, the back button. The faster your pages load, the better.

3. Usability

Flash can be great for some things, but never design your entire site, or your navigation with it. If someone doesn’t happen to have it installed (anyone on a smart phone, for example) they are unable to access your website. Plus, the search engines really can’t crawl or index your content within a flash site anyway. The bottom line is to make sure your site doesn’t rely on anything that your visitors may not have installed.

4. Call to action

Not having a call to action is like spending the entire night taking to a beautiful woman, but not asking for her phone number. You’ve put a lot of work into getting your website up and running, and even more work into driving traffic to it. Do you really want to just hope that your visitors are so excited that they take the time to figure out what you want them to do, and then do it? Make it clear and simple – if you want them to buy something, your headlines and buttons should clearly indicate that. The same goes for signing up for your newsletter or RSS feed or whatever action you want them to take.