Your web page is your internet business' front to the world, and the impression it makes is what will make or break your business. There's been an awful lot of design thought put into making web sites more attractive, some good - some bad. Here are a few Web Marketing Strategies we've learned since the web first started going commercial in 1993.

First, people will notice your site's color scheme before they see anything else. When assembling your site, put some thought into your colors and how they'll be used to set your company's thematic presence; make sure they're consistently applied, and reflect on how the colors resonate with you emotionally. Choose colors that highlight your products, and don't overwhelm.

Try to avoid creating a web page that people have to download components to view your page. The easier your page is to navigate, the longer people will hang around. This doesn't mean your page has to be boring. There are plug-in's that are common you can use. Some of the more common are Shockwave, Java, and Active X.

OK, now that we've de-cluttered the site, let's look at navigability. Most readers won't scroll past the third screen full of text. So if it's going to be important, put it on top. Use the journalist "inverted pyramid" and start with the most important information at the top and work your way down to the minutia at the bottom. While you're at it, make sure your lovingly search engine optimized content isn't written as gibberish for web spiders, but still makes sense to human beings.

Remember, content is king. It's why people are coming to your web site in the first place, regardless of whether they're a repeat visitor, or a random drive by led in by search engines. Make sure your content is worthwhile, make sure it updates regularly, and remember that people will click on advertising links only if they're interesting in the context of whatever content was there.

In the interests of making your site more easily maintained, use a content management system to control assets; use Cascading Style Sheets (well, the subset that are implemented properly in both IE 7 and Firefox) to keep your formatting separate from your content. That way, if you need to tweak the design, you do so in one file, rather than in 300.

You want to reach as large of an audience as possible, so communicating clearly is crucial for web marketing strategies. Communicating on your web page is much like conversation in real life. If your information and what you always have to say remains the same, people will get bored and probably not engage you in conversation much with you. The same applies to your web page.

Similarly, if you do have content that requires user interaction, please keep it in the bounds of a widely established plugin: Flash, Shockwave, PDF and Java are all acceptable. DIVX, Windows Media, Quicktime and whatever else out there may not be - it depends on what you can expect people who're hitting your site would have installed as a matter of course.