“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare,” says author Robert Wilensky. “Now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.”

There are tens of millions of websites out there. And a good many of them, in modern parlance, suck. They possess poor navigation, are overwritten, and are just painful to look at. While I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a web designer, I have learned a few tricks along the way. Here are seven suggestions to keep in mind as you stake claim to your little corner of the Internet: 

• Contrary to what you may think, the first thing most visitors to your website look at is not images, but content. They are there primarily to learn and gain information. Make sure to present your text in inverted pyramid format (the most important first). And make sure your headlines stand out and are unfettered. Will they tease the viewer into reading more?
• Viewers tend to filter out the clutter. Research shows they largely ignore banner ads. If you do run ads on your website (after all, they pay the rent), placement along the top and left side of the page usually get the most attention
• Keep your paragraphs short. Web pages are like the front pages of newspapers; viewers go to the top left corner of the page first and tend to scan quickly over the bottom portion of the page. Try using varied font sizes to promote the more important points
• One-column formats have been found in eye-fixation studies to be better accepted (read) than multiple columns. Your goal is to make viewing easy. Remember that the person staring at the screen can close his or her browser with just one click
• Remember that we read content on the Web in linear fashion. Don’t try to cram every bit of information on a single page. Link to other pages and let the viewer continue to click through depending on how much detail he or she is after
• Viewers tend to spend a lot of time exploring buttons and menus so make sure they are well designed. They tend to work best when spaced along the top of the page. And drop-downs are a good and familiar way for viewers to find their way around your website
• And finally, white space is not your enemy. You don’t have to fill every square inch of your website with images and text. Space it out. Providing bulleted lists is a good way to draw the viewer in