There follows some basic guidelines on designing to engage your online audience favorably.

We'll use the site Brothers Construction' as an example of a well designed site.

1. Choose your color scheme with care. Make sure the colors do not interfere with legibility of the text.

Avoid glaring color contrasts that make the user feel a little ill.

The example site uses white text on a black background with some red and brown.

2. Choose your fonts with care. More than two different fonts is too many.

Avoid overly large and overly small text size. Too large text can be seen as 'shouting' while too small text

becomes difficult to read, especially for older site users.

3. Keep the navigation user intuitive and simply laid out.

Use of mouse-over effects is fine to add spice, but stay away from effects or a layout that will confuse your users.

Remember that all internet users want to find what they are looking for as quickly and painlessly as possible.

4. Bear in mind screen resolutions. There are many different resolutions commonly used today.

The most common resolution still is 1024*768.

Aim to fit your site to fill this size with no scrolling required in the horizontal or vertical plane.

Depending on how the site is constructed you'll also need to account for how the site will look on the common larger

flat screens of these times.

5. The overall site look is largely determined by how the site is built. Hiring a professional,

expert in such areas as CSS, Flash and HTML coding' will yield a far superior result to trying

to wing it yourself using third party site-building tools or Microsoft FrontPage.

If you really want to promote your online image successfully, remember to invest in high quality design

and development for your site. Add this to an efficient site promotion campaign and you are well on your way!