Ever since the inception of World Wide Web in the early 90s, the website has become a crucial tool for almost every aspect of life. Whether it is business or social work, internet and websites, play an instrumental role in marketing, popularizing, and expressing views or even spreading news. It has become the most popular electronic media of the lightning fast era of 21st century.

Designing a website and putting it into the realms of the World Wide Web is not the only thing that you need to take care of. The lifeline of the website depends on several factors. Discussed below are some of the factors, which ensure the long-term existence of the designed website.

Appearance: It is true that a beautiful website is a treat for the eyes. This does not mean that the appearance is the most important factor. However, we cannot neglect the factor as well. It is good to design a beautiful website but it is more important to stress on other factors like usability and navigation, weight of the website and Search Engine Optimization.

Usability and Navigation: It is very important that a website designer must place himself/herself in the shoes of the visitor of the website. What will a visitor look for? The answer is straight and a simple one! People visit different websites in order to get some information or maybe they look for certain element of entertainment. Design a website with a couple of things in mind. The availability and the accessibility of the data (it may be a piece of information or something for entertainment like a song or a movie) and the ease of navigation through the website. These two actually form the lifeline of any website! For example, in case you are planning to launch a website for your company that sells electronic goods, the home page must contain some important information for the most popular electronic goods (the information may be one-liner). You can place a link that will lead the visitor to the page, which contains the full details of the product he/she is looking for. The trick is to make the website be user-friendly. If it is not and the visitor needs to put in hard labor to get the information, i.e. the navigation becomes difficult; your website is more likely to roll down in the list of search results.

Weight of the Website: This may sound a little difficult. Weight of the website actually means the size of the website. The smaller the size, smaller the server space it takes and the faster it loads. For example, if you wish to design a website that includes a large number of animations (flash animation, flex animation or something else); it will surely occupy a large space and will take time to load. This can have a negative impact and the number of visitors can fall drastically! Try to keep your website light and fast.

Search Engine Optimization and Visibility: Another very important factor is the visibility of your website. Different search engines use different algorithms for searching. Google serves 80% of the searches worldwide. There are certain words and scripts that make a site visible in the search engines like Google and Yahoo. Inclusion of such scripts and keywords helps to make your website visible to the people across the world.

Be careful when designing a website. An incorrect decision can make the website useless and the purpose is defeated!