Now having a minimalistic design will always look smart and fresh any time of the year and sometimes a simple colour change here and there will make it look new and smarter year on year.

So it’s a smart move for a business.

It may sound strange to suggest that there is much correlation between the creative fortunes of your website and the creative fortunes of producers of Christmas cards, but ultimately both disciplines must appeal to aesthetic considerations.

For both web users and Christmas card buyers, there is a complex visual and aesthetic relationship in play when they decide what sites and cards appeal to them. Design effectively represents the very first impression made by both websites and Christmas cards. If the first impression is a poor one then the web user will shut their browser as quickly as the Christmas card buyer will return their card to the shelf.

It makes sense to get involved in design yourself, but if you don’t really have the confidence or the expertise then you could hire someone who does. Those who write great material for the inside of Christmas cards often need the help of creative people to give their ideas visual representations too.

Users of Internet Exporer 6 will receive a ‘warning’ message notifying them of the impending changes to the website.

The decision to drop support may not come as a surprise, seeing as Youtube is owned by Google who are now quite clear on their stance about Internet Explorer 6. Other Google applications are likely to follow suit. These changes could be seen as an indication that there will be more websites dropping support as the number of people using the old Internet Explorer browser keeps decreasing.

Of course, the changes have to be inline with the existing design and make sense to the website’s target audience. Well thought out tweaks to an existing design can positively and dramatically change how users engage with the site.

It can also make sense from a financial point of view – making small changes to an existing design is much cheaper than looking into doing an entire new redesign.

This is where research can play a major role. Look at the type of website that the design will go to – does it have a majority audience? For example, a website selling baby clothes is likely to attract new mothers as its major type of visitor. You can then research whzat kind of look this target audience wil appreciate – checking out similar websites in your market can help.

It’s important that this kind of thinking is foremost in your mind when going through a web design – you might love the design but if it doesn’t suit the type of website it is unlikely to be successful!

If you’re just a company starting out with a limited budget, it may be worth looking to cut the costs of your website build by looking at pre-built templates. A simple search in Google will provide plenty of places to buy templates for all manner of website platforms, from simple brochure websites to large ecommerce systems.

The design may not be unique to your website, but with so many options available and the relatively low costs it can be more than worth it.

Keep page load times down
You will no doubt have heard before that a visitor will assess your website in the first few seconds of reaching the website – if they have to spend the first few seconds waiting for the website to actually load, there’s little chance they’ll be as interested as if the site were to load quickly!

Optimal Site Navigation
Another important factor is to make sure your new site is as simple as possible to navigate. This includes steps such as making all pages accessible in as few clicks as possible and incorporating an effective search function on the site.

I’ll let you into a little secret. The top designers are also in the very same boat as you and they cannot just design ace looking sites.

What many of them do is take their laptops in a cafe, buy a nice warm cup of cappuccino and start to look around at scene and automatically they get some good inspiration!

Little do they know that in actual fact, their design looks like something from the last century!

So it’s always good to gain a second opinion on something as sometimes a reality check is needed… trust me!

I’ve personally been there and have ended up with some designs which doesn’t even look like a website!

So how do you make sure your designs are good?

Now many of the people who get onto the first page of Digg are not prepared for it and leads to their site going down.

Why is this? When a site reaches the first page of Digg, tens of thousands of visitors will visit the site within a very short period of time.

As the website won’t be catered for this number of visitors, the server will go down and will be down for a few hours at least.