Making a user-friendly website design
Let me list down few points to be kept in mind while designing a website.
In my 10 years of experience in designing websites I have realized that small things like clean HTML code and a user friendly layout is very important.
Most amateur designers don’t pay attention to these important aspect of any website.
Sole aim of websites is not just attracting traffic but to  convert that traffic into customers.
A Clean and Consistent Layout
A cluttered design is only going to confuse the visitor.
Keep it simple and clean.
Try to highlight things by using bold fonts or the heading tags.
Highlight things which you think will be useful to your visitor.
Search engines recognise our efforts and help you achieve good ranking when correct and appropriate heading / title tags are used regularly.
Accessible Links / Buttons
Buttons are useless if your visitors do not recognise that they are buttons or hyperlinks.
Make sure that the color of your text and color of your hyperlinks are different and easily visible.
Prefer hyperlinks with underline as most visitors are not techno savvy when it comes to surfing and recognizing links. A Easy accessible links / buttons are important aspect of designing an user friendly website interface.
Legible Fonts
Use fonts size which can are legible on all resolutions. some people work on 1024 resolution some 1280 or higher.
It is of utmost importance that our content is readable else the site is useless and loses its affect.
Being a designer, I love small and cute fonts but it can cause irritation to visitors who are not used to very small fonts.
I would recommend font size 10 to 12 for a normal website with 1024 as the target resolution.
Flash Animation
Search engines still have not reached that advanced level where their robot can crawl through flash content.
I would recommend minimal use of flash content on your websites unless you are not expecting any visitors from search engines.
Easily Accessible Contact Information
An accessible contact form or big lettered phone numbers will get you good results.
A visitor is most likely to contact you via these easy methods of contacting you.
Error Free surfing
A 404 page can be the most irritating thing that could happen to your potential customer.
A thorough check of all links and images is something which is a must before uploading your content.
Now a days software’s like Dreamweaver provide you tools which check broken links automatically.
Search engines are known to penalize sites which have errors or 404 errors in them.
Sitemap
A well-planned sitemap is important in case you have a huge site with a lot of deep linking in your website.
A sitemap makes most pages of a website accessible to both the visitor as well as search engines.