Design Aesthetics, Layout And Colour Palette
Imagine if your website was a person how will he look, how will he dress up and how will he communicate. Design and colour scheme of the website should represent your or your company’s basic character and values. It does make a reasonable difference in how a visitor perceives you on the basis of visual representation of your site. You need to ensure that your target audience is able to relate to what they see.

Clear And Direct Communication
Many of sites are very lean on the content, at times to the extent that it is nowhere close to truly representing the capabilities and achievements. And in many cases the content is so exhaustive that the specific message intended for the visitor gets lost. Rarely users bother to go through so much of text. Ensure that your site has optimal amount of text content, articulated in a manner which is quick for a user to read and is able to communicate the message directly and clearly, just what the user would expect to read or might be looking for.

Simple And Intuitive Navigation
Structure the navigation and content hierarchy in a manner which is easy to use for a human user as well as search engine. Try not to have web pages deep down in a directory hierarchy. Any page of the site should be accessible in not more than three clicks. Site must have at least one text link to all the important pages on the site. Categorize the content to place them in appropriate buckets, which can be identified intuitively. Having a comprehensive sitemap page containing the links to all the important pages could be really useful for user navigation.

Using Content Management System (CMS)
If your site has content which requires frequent updates then use of CMS is definitely worth considering. Generally many corporate sites have sections like ‘News and updates’, or ‘Press Releases’ or ‘Job openings’ or product catalogs, which may require update on a regular basis. Having a custom CMS catering to the management of these sections will give you a significant level of independence. You will not have to go to the development team for every small detail that needs to be changed. While creation of CMS is a one time additional development effort, it gives a complete control over information management.

Considerations For SEO
Any business, whether small scale or large scale, local or global, is now becoming increasingly dependent on its presence on the internet and how well it fairs in the search engines rankings. Best practices for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) must be taken into account right from the technical design phase of the website. A well developed website will not only be the most effective enabler for the growth of your business but will also save a significant amount of rework in the future. In case the site is not good from a technical standpoint, you are bound to realize it at a later point that there is no other option but to do the technical revamping of the site, which at times could be no less than the creation of a new site. Remember the saying ‘A stitch in time saves nine’.

Considerations For Security
Security considerations must be taken into account at the time of technical design of the website. Database driven features must be capable of avoiding SQL injection attacks. All the interactive features must be safeguarded against the cross site scripting attacks. Sensitive information must be encrypted before storing and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) should be used on web pages containing sensitive information. Robust role based authentication must be enforced if some parts of he site have restricted access.

Optimal Use Of Flash / Multimedia Content
While Flash / multimedia can create rich and interactive graphics and could be excellent in visual appeal to general users, they completely disregard the search engines and people with disability. If you want to make the site search engine friendly as well as accessible to people with disability (it is a legal compliance requirement in some countries), then Flash  / multimedia should not be used for any important content. It should be used only to add a flavour and not as a key ingredient.

Adding Sticky Features
Think about innovative features which could create interest among your target audience. These are referred as sticky features as they tend to engage the users for a longer time and provide motivation to revisit the site. Generally features offering interesting data analysis, quick interactivity or food for thought are excellent sticky features.

Considerations For Maintainability
Technical design of the website must provide the flexibility to re-brand, enhance and upgrade the site. Most of the details which can possibly change with the hosting environment, domain name or technical considerations must be parameterized to have minimal impact on the code. Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) should be used to render easy to configurable look and feel. Settings like database access information, mail server information, domain name, etc., must not be hardcoded within the codebase. Wherever possible reusable building blocks should be used for creating the web pages, so that making any change at a later point of time is not a nightmare.

Considerations For Scalability
If you expect number of users of your site to increase significantly (surely you would want to) ensure that the database design is optimized with various considerations like relationships, data integrity constraints, appropriate indexing, special considerations for resource exhaustive database operations, etc. Technical components must provide multithreading and safeguards for concurrent operations. Web forms must not contain data elements, e.g. drop down lists, which can grow to an unmanageable size with the data or number of users.

* There are several hardware, hosting environment and performance related factors, which are not of any lesser importance. These will be explained in a separate article.