Stark Backgrounds

Getting people to read your hard-worked content is very important, and a great way of making the body of your website stand out is by making the background a very contrasting colour, so that the body seems like a page lying on a dark desk. A blue background and white body is a good option as well as a dark colour on white.

Videos

A good way of livening that dreary old site up, is by inserting videos that load on click that can explain how your product works. In mentioning it is worth while saying that you can save a lot of bandwidth by uploading your video to You-tube and embedding that clip into your site. This way You-tube pays for the bandwidth and not you.

Blogs or Forums

Who says you need to generate new content for your site in order to keep people interested (or for Google’s sake)? Well, fresh content is essential, but why not get others to create it for you? Set up a blog or forum and let people submit comments and share their views in topics related to your business.

Sounds and Music

Add a backtrack to your website, and set the mood for your viewers. Take them to another place with a simple piece of code, simply upload an mp3 to your domain and insert the following code into your pages: sounds/your-song.mp3" width="1" height="1">

Useful Functionality

Retain more clients, or at least get some contact details from them using useful functionality on the site such as a newsletter quick-subscribe or a quick enquiry form. Another great function to have on your website is a search function, as you can determine what people want when they come to your site, and make those pages more visible to them.

See these websites as examples of what good websites look and function like:

http://www.circuitcity.com/

http://www.sandals.com/