The website should be designed in such a way that it will be visitor and search engine friendly.
Some important Web designing tips are:

1. The landing or the home page should be eye catching, looks cool and attractive.
2. The colour combination should be perfect, if possible use green or blue and avoid black and red.
3. Properly navigated so that visitor can move to any page.
4. There should be relevant content about your business or services.
5. The contact address, phone no or form should be in proper position of home page.
6. The logo of your company should be there.
7. Put small images with “alt text” relevant to your business.
8. Do not make your site heavy and un ordered.

Some more tips appreciated.....

I want to add that internet reading is harder than reading something written on a paper. When reading something on the screen we do it diagonally - from the top left corner to the bottom right. So when you structure a site it is good to place the important information or the information you want the user to see first following that. :)

Partly agreed. Coolness very personal though. What is cool to me might look like a garbage to you.
I would change this like: "Colors should be in harmony, or should follow a concept". Any color can be used. Why blue and green and not red and black?
Agreed
Errr..Absolutely but, I never saw for example a Hosting company's web site full of vegetarian recipies :). Most of the time contents are relevant to business. Agreed anyway.
I'd say: You must have an "About Us" page with your address, phone and other information. And you must have "Contact Us" page with a mail form. (I personally hate email links like: mailto:xxxx@xxxxx.com)
Agreed, but I would say "You must have a professional looking logo".
Sure. Actually all images must have relevant alternative texts and titles.
Absolutely.
--------- Additionally ---------
Always define a DOCTYPE, and obey the syntax rules of that DOCTYPE.
Check your website in multiple browsers.
Use tables for tubular data. DIVs for layouts.

The colors depend on the content and the purpose of the site , so I absolutely agree that any color can be used :)

Thank u BurakUeda for your nice tips.
Some more tips..........

Regarding #7...

Do not put images into your site simply for the sake of having alternative text on your site. It really carries much less weight than people think. The simple rule for images is as follows:

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If the image has contextual value, that is to say,
- if it directly supports or demonstrates a statement made within the text of the page, or
- it carries instrinsic value relative to the site in general (logos, banners, etc),
it should be displayed as an image on the page in the traditional way (<img src="..." alt="...">).

If an image does not do what is described above and is primarily or wholly ornamental in nature, it should be declared within your CSS and called into the page as a background object.

(if you're wondering about the origins of this rule, I wrote it, just now :) )

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Alternative text may have some (very little) affect on search engines, but you owe it to your visitors to stop thinking so much about SEs and and to think about human interaction instead. The purpose of alternative text is to act as a suitable replacement in the event a human visitor is unable to view an image, due to browsing technology or physical disability. Dropping a bunch of ornamental images into your page and blanketing them with alt text is going to hinder a human visitor from using your site. This is very irresponsible behavior on the part of a Web designer!

So, tip #7 should talk about using images appropriately, as opposed to just just blindly throwing images and alt text onto a page.

Just a clarification :)

yes, alt text has less effect but it is useful for visitors. We have to design visitor friendly as well as SE friendly.

Some solid points. To gather more on the functionality aspect of design, useit dot com is a fantastic resource.

Some solid points. To gather more on the functionality aspect of design, useit dot com is a fantastic resource.

useit.com - nothing special

Some ok tips but the one about colors is totally not a good tip.

"if possible use green or blue and avoid black and red"

That makes no sense, and black and red are great colors. You can't tell people not to use certain colors as a tip.. I mean comon that makes no sense theirs all sorts of styles of websites.. Why just green or blue? Very odd..

Exactly... :)

According to photo science blue and green colours are friendly to eyes where as red is harmful. But choose colour in your choice, it odesn't matter a lot.

Striped backgrounds seem to be popular I found www.stripegenerator.com takes the tedium out of creating. I know I need to get out more as I find it fun to play with!

Striped background is good, but many people don't like it. On my point of view striped background makes the page disordered.
If the color combination is proper then it is alright. When you are keeping content the backgorund should be cool, and good-looking.