Listed below are some useful and rather important tips 
for designing a professional and high quality web site:

Neat and Easy Navigation: 
Navigation of links on your site plays a big role in determining 
the stickiness of your site (how long your visitor stays and 
explores your site). Ask yourself this, what do visitors do as 
soon as they open your site? They would probably read the 
content of the present page and then look
around to find any 
other page that interests them. 

Clean Layout Design: 
A clean layout that uses a lot of white space enhances a site\'s looks. 
Try to keep the focus on your content, use a template for this. 
Use fonts that will be available on all computers to prevent your 
site looking messed up. 

Optimum Load Time: 
Make sure your load time is low. 
For this you must: 
Minimize Graphics, Flash and scripts -->They hugely
increase your file size. 
Optimize your HTML & script code -->Make sure that your site doesn\'t 
have any unwanted tags or unused scripts.
Use Server Side Include (SSI) files where ever possible. 
SSI files once called from the web server reside in its cache 
so on subsequent requests they load faster. 

Design for all Screen Resolutions: 
A site that is easy-to-use always encourages visitors to stay 
and read your content. For site with
long pages of content this 
is very crucial as the amount of scrolling required is reduced. 
Suppose your site doesn\'t look good for a particular resolution 
it is very probable that the visitor will close the browser window 
feeling that the web page is not for their viewing. 
Designing stretch layouts that fit any screen resolution ensures 
that you know all your visitors see a visually appealing and 
professional site. 

Ensure Web site
scalability: 
Make sure your code and design is scalable. As technology 
advances and configuration of computers & their monitors 
keep increasing and varying it is impossible to test your site 
in all screen sizes and platforms. 

Cross Browser Compatible: 
Make sure you check your site for Internet Explorer 5+ and 
Netscape Navigator 4+ as they constitute 95% of the world\'s browsers.