When a visitor comes to your site, he wants to look around and see what you have that will be useful to him. Average time he spends on your site might be different and depends on the reason why he came to your site.

What ever your visitors intentions are you should be able to present your web site services and products before them. If you don't take care of few simple things, that might affect your visitors stay on your web site and inturn your sales and profits.

Remember... The longer your visitor stays, more chances of seeing your products and more will be the sales.

Here are few web design tips that usually be neglected by newbie webmasters:

1. Consistent Layout:

Take care of maitaining uniformity through out your web site.

=Font size
=Font colors
=Link colors
=Table width
=logo
=List of links in the same order

When I see 'Verdana, Arial, Times New Roman' on all same page what will be my first opinion? its a Newbie Web site...

If you don't know about Layouts, check out other web sites how they are doing. Spend little time on your web site layout planning.

2. Navigation:

Keep good navigation on your web site. Your visitor should go to any page of your site to other page with ease. If you have lot of products then keep links to main pages of site from where visitor can go to your product pages.

Talking about navigation, check all your links whether they are working and for typos. If you keep good navigation on your pages with out links working... No good at all.

A tip in creating navigation system: You can use SSI (Server Side Includes) to include one footer.txt on all your pages. So if you change the links in that footer.txt, changes apply to all of your web pages. More about this you can read here: http://www.webmasters-central.com/wd/ssi-content.shtml

3. Sales pages with Headings and Subheadings:

Headings and Subheadings convey most important aspects of your products to your visitor. People most of the time or at first glance of your product page, they just scroll down once to get the whole idea. So keeping headings and subheadings attracts the visitors attention and tells the most important features and benefits of your product.

4. Order page secrets:

OK... Your visitor decides to buy your product. So is there anything you can do to encourage him to buy your product?

On the Order page -
= Keep a picture of your product on your order page.
= List out the benefits of your product
= State any free bonuses he will get with the purchase
= Display any discount or promotional code you have
= DON'T keep any external links to other web sites

5. Protect your Downloads:

Yes... This is the age of Software products and Instant Downloads. Protect your downloads from software pirates.

There are so many scripts and methods to protect your downloads. Scripts that were designed to go with Clickbank, Paypal or iBill or any other creditcard processing system. http://www.webmasters-central.com/Server_side_Coding/CGI_and_Perl/Password_Protection/index.shtml

Make sure you buy the scripts that protects your thankyou pages, members areas, link protection which cloacks your product file urls.