When it comes to creating your website, extra attention should be given to every little detail in order to make sure it performs to its full potential and to serve its purpose. Here are five important rules of thumb to observe in order to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages
A Splash page is the first page you see when you arrive on to a website. They usually have a very nice image with words like “welcome to” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they simply delay the visitor before they see the actual content on your website. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button to search for another website! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
The last thing you want to do is make your website look cheap and nasty or scare them away with advertisements. Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements, so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave more subtle ads among the good content.

3) Have user friendly navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. That pretty much says it all right there. Make sure that the visitor can get back to page one easy as well as making it easy to find content. It’s a simple road map for the user to know where they are going. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.