During the late 1990's, where any man could create his own website - this was also a time when any man did. Fortunately, things have progressed from this trend, and now most people will only visit, let alone know of a website if it passes the grueling tests of the consumer market adequately. Here are some tips for a successful website:

1) Building Blocks

    * Acquire a domain name,
    * One must be dedicated to create a site, and therefore should keep it a priority update the site often with new material, so as to keep visitors appeased.

2) Thinking caps on:

    * Plan what your website will offer its visitors thoroughly.
    * Mud mapping your site's various facets and potential uses is boring.

3) What you sew is what you reap:

    * Whether the site is intended or used for business or leisure related visitation, most people will expect to view sites as professionally made, so keep it commercially acceptable.
    * Try and relate the site's content, right down to the colors used, relevant to the target audience.

4) If you can see it from the street:

    * The aesthetic layout of your site will be what decides a user's first impressions of it.
    * Use positioning and color scheming relevant to the target audience, for example. A computing related site might have electric neon blue highlights on a minimalist grey fascia, to subtly represent computer technology and raw electricity.
    * Favorable at present are anti-aliased vector graphics, the kind you see in Macromedia based software, amongst others. Take extra time to create or edit stylized buttons as opposed to hyperlinked text, the effect will be drastic, but use sparingly.

5) Interactivity:

    * Incorporate portions of your site to pages that can be interacted with, such as forums or Wiki's; studies have indicated the levels of interactivity present in computer games are key to their preference of games over repetitive homework or chores.

6) It's not what you know:

    * Once your site is ready for publication, get the word out! Let people know about your web venture through relevant forums or link trades with other sites for a mutual traffic increase.
    * Alternatively, you could sign up with a popular online advertising agent such as Google or Adbrite to post ads on relevant searches, eventually gaining enough traffic to host advertisements and make per-click profits.

So there you have it. Follow these basic principles, and your website will be closer to becoming the home page for more than 1 billion web browsers.

Good luck!

Thanx or sharing such tips with us.

I agree with your great ideas. If you are selling or offering a service, building trust is extremely important. It can be achieved by getting testimonials from customer and getting reviews from market experts. It helps a lot to convert traffic to sales.   

I agree but I humbly recommend that if you create a website you should consider 2 things:

1. Website content must be of original, informative and relevant. This will be the basis of SEO to give rank to your website and put it on the top list. While,

2. Website presentation must be eye-friendly  so that your reader will understand your website very well. Take note that if in presentation it much better that you don't include some faces of people if you're not sure if you know them to avoid negative issues on the internet...

Cheers!