You need to pay attention to ensure every minute detail in your website design is observed to ensure peak performance of your site. Many new webmasters feel the need to entertain their visitor by adding expensive, fancy flash works that can actually hamper the optimal performance of their site.

Here are five basic website design rules to help you in your quest to achieve maximum web performance for maximum results.

1) Try to avoid using splash pages

Splash pages makes up the first impression people have of a website. They are dazzling pages that have images with words such as „welcome or „click here to enter. The unfortunate thing is splash pages actually takes away attention from the real purpose of the website, and often frustrates users with their slow loading time. This page serves a good purpose to entertain but if website conversion is your goal, it can be a big barrier for you to achieve your goals.

2) Reduce the number of banners on your site

Although these can be at the foot of a web page, adverts like this are primarily placed right at the top of the page in what is called the ‚header‘. Adding banner ads are actually futile efforts to maximize the use of your website as space research shows that people tend to ignore such advertisements. Instead add useful contents and add your affiliate links skillfully into the body of the text so that it would seem like a natural part of your text and not an advertisement.

3) Provide your site with an easy navigation system

The best navigation would one that a young child can understand. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered drop down menus. Any form of complicated navigation will cause them to leave your site for good. Your website design should include the construction a sitemap that will make it easy for them to find what they want.

4) Make it clear where the user is at the moment

When you have successfully captured their attention and enjoying the whole experience perusing your website, you will want to make them know where they are at the moment without feeling lost. This way, they can easily navigate the exact section they want. Make sure that every page has its own title and that some form of breadcrumb trail is used to track the visitors step throughout the entire website. If you confuse your visitors in any way they will leave.

5) Follow this simple rule- do not use audio

If you want your visitors to stay a long time and read the contents, do not irritate em with your audio. Whenever you decide to use sound, be sure not to let it loop continuously because this a huge cause of irritation to people browsing sites. Adding audios may seem cool but provide some form of user control such as muting ability or volume control so that your visitors can adjust accordingly. If you wish for the visitors to return to your site, learn to apply all these website design rules and you can reap the benefits of long term traffic.