When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are four important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do Not Use Splash Pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty pictures with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do Not Use Excessive Banner Advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valuable content and weave relevant links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a Simple and Clear Navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. Also, make sure that your visitors can access any major pages from your site from any other page in your site. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Avoid Using Music on Your Site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some music looping over and over on your website. If you insist on adding music, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

Following these rules does not guarantee your site will be a success, but it will give your visitors a much more pleasurable experience.