Lots of buttons are down-right ugly, but they are easy to find and help your site's ranking with search engines. Break them up into different sections. The least important buttons should appear as hyperlinks at the bottom of the web page.

People looking at a web page will say that they are drawn first to the images, but images use a lot of memory and can dramatically increase the size of your site. Optimize and crop images to decrease file sizes which will improve the download speed.

Flash websites have the bling factor but they take a long time to load and are not as easily seen by search engines. Use an HTML site with a bit of flash for a happy medium.

The words that appear in images aren't searchable by search engines but they will always appear just as you designed them. Use them sparingly, and assign an image tag for optimization.

Website backgrounds that are merely a solid color use a small amount of memory, while large images in the background slow down your site. A compromise would be an image that is less than 5 pixels wide and repeatable.

Websites that have a large amount of copy have better search engine optimization than those without. The only problem is that users bombarted with a lot of text tend to leave a site. Separate the information into readable chunks.

Putting links on your website will help your site's SEO, but you don't want people to leave your site for another. The best thing to do is open the other site in a new window and hope that your visitor will return after closing the new window.

It's a dangerous world but we have to do business. When listing your contact information, don't use personal phone numbers and type out the @ symbol so your email address can't be harvested for spamming.

A great way to organize a navigation system is to utilize drop-down menus, but there are two downfalls. Some users never roll over the first level of buttons and others haven't updated their Javascript so the buttons won't work for them.

Click on a logo in the top left corner of a site and you are probably going to be directed to the home page. Even though it seems to have become conventional, some users still don't know this.