Admittedly website usability and visual sparkle is something that is far from a perfect science. But there are a few basic things that you should keep in mind when designing or having someone design your site. Especially if your website is a business website. As a business website you likely want one, all, or a combination of the following: provide product(service) information, provide contact information, allow users to buy products(services), acquire feedback from your clients and potential clients. To do this you want to make sure your information can be found and once found is easy to navigate while remaining professional looking.

Here are some quick pointers to get you started as you determine where to go with your site:

1. Keep in mind that many users these days are potentially viewing your site on any number of devices at any number of screen resolutions. The one sure thing is that they will all see the top left of your site. Whether they click through the rest is another question. It is for that reason that when looking at a layout for your site you should prioritize and place your content so that the key items to your business and the site start at the top left working your way down to the least important which should be found at the bottom right.

2. Visual sparkle is nice. You do want to draw your users in. However, it can cause issues if you go overboard. Images and flash add load times. Users are on your site for content or to buy from you, you can still look professional with a toned down graphical site. Also you should avoid under all circumstances building a completely flash based website. Partially because of load times, but most importantly because you are killing the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendliness of your site. Use flash components where they make sense. A perfect example of flash being used simply as a component is with YouTube.com. Video is served up via flash but the rest of the site is HTML. Load times are fast and SEO is taken advantage of.

3. Navigation menus are a must. In fact I would recommend you play around with having multiple ways to get you your various pages and content. Avoid flash menus as again they hinder your SEO capabilities. Navigation is key to a successful site, if a user cannot find what he is looking for in the first few seconds he is on your site, he is likely gone forever.