A website is your online office or shopping store. Your effort at building your office or store should be to make it presentable and easily accessible to your customers. Once they are inside your store, they should be able to easily locate the merchandise they want to buy.

The merchandise should have legible and prominently fixed price tags. It should carry all the information that a customer is likely to know. The ways to different sections of the mall should be clearly marked. There should be sign boards properly pointing to them. It hardly needs to be mentioned that if the shopping is not made easy, enjoyable and convenient for the customer, he may not come back again.

The same is exactly applicable to a website. A website should be so framed that navigating through its pages or different sections should be a pleasant experience for the visitors.

Some webmasters add a lot of gloss and glitz to the website. They decorate their websites with lots of features and content. They appear to design the website to satisfy their own whims, fads or their own aesthetic sense. It is like creating art for art’s sake.

They load it with videos that just refuse to open because of their heavy size. Instead of putting simple text links in the navigation menu, they place flashy images and symbols that sometimes adding to the attraction of the site, simply serve to drive away the visitors. When they click on them the opening pages or windows contain a different kind of information from the one that the visitor is looking for.

What therefore matters most for a webmaster is that he should put himself in his user’s shoes. He should empathize with him--- think from his point of view. He should think that if he were to be a visitor to the kind of website he has built, how would he react if his precious time was wasted trying to skip from page to page and yet not finding the information that he may be looking for?

Depending upon the nature of your business, a website should be an easy source of information. The user does not usually spend time on the Internet to find the type of entertainment that is available on the television, a theatre or a cinema hall.

A web searcher wants some information, product or a service. He wants an easy, fast and direct access to it in a comfortable environment. He does not want to get lost in a jungle of irrelevant information clothed in decorative jargon. He wants the information to be prominently displayed in form of bolded or bulleted words and sentences. The content should be numerically sequenced if possible.

The content in the website should be so structured and interspersed with relevant text links that the visitors can click on them to go to the next logical pages without going to the menu.

The content should be properly paragraphed preceded by suitable titles so that the visitor knows in advance what to expect from it before he wastes his time on it and leave it in disgust.

All this can be done only if the webmaster keeps the website user in his mind. If a teacher speaks a language which goes above the heads of his students, he will fail to attract them to his class. It must not be forgotten that the true expertise of a successful webmaster lies in bringing himself to the level of his users.

The website design and other software applications incorporated in the website should be user friendly. This is more especially needed if your website is devoted to retail sales with hundreds of different items like toys, clothing, and automobile spare parts and so on.

A slow download is a great repellent to the user. Slow downloads happen due to large images, videos and unreasonable font sizes.

It is advisable that a webmaster should try to minimize the click-throughs to find the necessary information. Your website should not be an online translation of your glossy business brochure.

It must always be noted that the first impression is the most important factor in retaining the visitor to the website. According to industry statistics around 75% of the visitors tend to leave the website within just five seconds if they do not find what they intend to look for. A business can lose 60% of its potential customers due primarily to the poorly designed websites.

Visitors tend to be irritated with the websites that have heavily crowded pages or pages “with large and intrusive watermarks”. Some websites proudly flaunt background music that cannot be turned off.

The result is that the website fails to succeed in achieving its purpose which is to attract the visitors and close the sales.