If you are going to design your online shop website, or any other kind of business website yourself, then there are a few important tips that you need to keep in mind. These will help you give your users a better browsing experience when they look at your site and it will also be helpful for SEO in certain cases.

• Use the right color scheme

There is a variety of backgrounds and templates that you can use for your website. Some are simple solid colors, while others feature intricate and creative design elements. The most important thing here is that the text of your website is clearly visible to your users. So if your website background is black, then you will need to make your text a bright color, such as white or gold, to stand out.

• Avoid using pre-fabricated templates

There are hundreds of free website templates that you can find online and use for your website. This is great, however you should know that if you were able to download that template for free and use it on your site, then so did hundreds of others webmasters on the internet. Therefore, there will probably be many sites that look just like yours. Don’t be afraid to modify the design to make it look more unique. You can easily do this with a graphics manipulation program such as Photoshop or GIMP. This would allow you to customize things like backgrounds, headers, buttons, etc. You can also pay for a custom template to be designed for you, however this can cost between $25 and $1000 depending on what you want done and how complex it is.

• Check to make sure your site works with all browsers

Test out your website in all browser, like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome to make sure that it works well and all elements appear correctly. This will provide a better user experience for your visitors. Also, it is a good idea to create a mobile version of your site as well. Since there is an increasing amount of visitors that use smart phones like the iPhone or Android phones to shop online, this can be very useful. There are many free tools and tutorials that are available online to webmasters which would allow you to accomplish this.

• Test all elements of your site before deploying it

This is an important part. Once you are done designing your website, make sure that everything works well and is bug free. Check to make sure that all your links work, for example. There are automated tools that can let you easily do that and can save you a lot of problems, as it often happens that a typo could make a link not working or an image not displaying correctly. Also, check your payment gateway to be sure that it sends your customers to the checkout page correctly and that the prices, minus any discount offers or promotions, are reflected in the right way on your site. Many payment gateways have a “Sandbox” mode for testing purposes.

The biggest growing segment on the internet for traffic is mobile web browsers. Every smartphone (minus BlackBerry until BB 6.0, at least) has a very capable web browser able to display rich content just like you are used to on your computer.

The problem is, it isn’t always fluid. What does that mean? When you are viewing your website on the web browser, and you have an iPhone or Android phone (without Flash) your header image might not be there because it was Adobe Flash based instead of HTML. That ruins the experience for the viewer, and with more and more people that will be viewing your website on their phone you need to do something about it.

First thing first, no Flash. I don’t care if Android just announced they would be getting Flash today, you are still segmenting a huge piece of the market if you continue to use Flash on your website. It simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Another thing to be conscience of is your navigation. I have a Motorola Milestone and it doesn’t have the best touch screen (actually, it is horrendous). The inability to click on tiny links is very frustrating to me and ruins my experience (and wastes my time) on may of my favorite sites.

By making navigation bigger and easier to select (and not select the wrong one) you will improve your user experience both on computer and mobile browsers. Drop down menus are a great example, Android phones can click the first link fine, but any links in the drop down menu can be easily mis-clicked while on a mobile device, breaking the experience.

You can have a great website for a computer, but make sure you also consider the mobile device. Having your designer code for the mobile version as well is really important. Keep the mobile market in mind when doing anything, or have a complete mobile version. WordPress and many other platforms have great mobile plugins that allow you to easily transform your design into a mobile version, or create your own.