Designing a website?  Want to draw a crowd? Want to keep that crowd coming back to your site?

Good website design is more than just a nice color scheme, fancy Flash applications, images and icons.  A good website is easy to use and user-friendly, even the ugly ones.  Easy to use means that the sections of the site are clearly labeled, content is easy to find and the site serves a specific purpose beyond existing.  The days when just having a website was good enough are long gone.  The majority of the design choices must strike a balance between functionality and appearance.

To maintain this balance, there are five things you should do during the design process to ensure your website draws the right visitors, ensures they can find the content they’re looking for, encourages them to stay at your site and keeps them coming back for more.  Let’s start with the least important, visual appearance.

FULL ARTICLE: Website Design – Beauty is skin deep