By now you should have everything you need to build your website. You signed up for an account at WebStarts.com and that took care of the domain, hosting, and design tools. You're now looking at a blank canvas or perhaps you chose from one of the hundreds of pre-designed sites from WebStarts. Either way you'll need to begin to customize your pages in a way that make sense for your product or service. A good place to start with your general web design is to ask yourself - What's the goal of my website? Is the goal to gain new customers? Is it to convery information? Is it to sell products? Is the goals to generate a phone call or capture an email address? Is it to compliment some other form of marketing I'm already doing? Whatever the goal is of your website needs to be the focus of your design. Whatever your goal is there are several guidelines you can follow that will give you the best chance to reach them. One of the first things you need to know is that the average person will only wait about 7 seconds for a page to load before moving on. This means you need to design a page that will load fast. Here are some of the things that will help you keep your webpages loading quickly. 1. Optimize your images for the web. When you run out and snap a photo with your 8 megapixel camera it's going to produce a large image. Most likely the image is going to be at least 2mb. If you upload that raw image to your website it's going to cause your page to load extremely slow. 2mb is a lot of data. Just think of when you're downloading other things like a song from the internet. Depending on your connecting a 2mb file can take several seconds to a few minutes. The first step to optimizing your images is to make them smaller. When you snapped that photo on an 8 megapixel camera it produced an image size that is entirely too big for your web page. I recommend keep your images 800x600 at most. That ensures they'll be viewable on most screen sizes while keeping the page loading times quick. If you convert the image to an optimized JPEG or PNG you'll be able to make it load even faster. Following these steps will lead to your page loading at least 50 times faster. 2. Don't put too many images on one page. Everytime someone loads a web page your browser is requesting files from a server. The more files it has to request, the longer it takes for the page to load. So even if you have many small files you're still generating a lot of small requests. In most instances it's better to generate one large request as opposed to many small ones. So if you're designing a graphic for your webpage try to reduce the number of images (requests) by combining those images. Overall try to limit the number of images you include on a page. Remember your site visitors are only willing to wait about 7 seconds for your page to load. 3. Don't use Flash. There are a lot of great things about Flash. Flash can allow you to create some really dynamic web pages filled with catchy animations. But none of that matters if the page never loads. Flash files typically take a while to load. In additon they rely on the Flash Player being installed on the website visitors computers. If you want to get the most out of your website you should avoid using Flash altogether. Later on I'll share with you several reasons why. 4. Don't over do it with scripts and code. Many times slow loading pages can be causes by adding third party scripts and code to a page. These third party scripts rely on contacting other servers before they allow the page to load. So let's say for example you have a tracking script that let's you know who visited your website and where they came from. If that script attempts to contact an external sever and that sever is running slowly our not available it will cause your page to load slowly or in some cases not at all. Overall try not to include too many of these code snippets or scripts. 5. Use a lot of text. It may not look as stunning as photos or be as catchy but text is the still the best way to communicate infromation on a webpage. Using a lot of text to convey your message will ensure your site is not only running fast but also getting the best possible search engine position. Search engine robots/spiders read text on your website to know what your website is all about. These robots/spiders cannot read images. Even if you have words in your image they will not be picked up by search engines. And if the search engines cannot determine what your site is about you'll receive low ranking and it will be hard people to find you online. If you do everything right your pages will load quickly and you'll have the eyeballs of your audience, but for only 3 or 4 seconds. In the next post I will reveal what you need to do to capture the attention of your site visitors and keep them on your page.