If your website doesn't project a professional and polished image to your visitors, your credibility and that of your products and services will suffer. Image is everything—especially online where your competitor is only one mouse click away!

Before your first HTML code is written, you will need to consider your website's navigational structure, color scheme and page layout. Is your content developed? If not, who is going to write it?

Once you have done the necessary preplanning, then the fun part begins—coding your HTML pages.

I've been an e-publisher for a couple of years now. Publishing an e-mail newsletter (e.g., E-zine) is a fabulous way to market your website. But getting started takes planning, hard work and commitment.

First, you need to decide on the subject of your E-zine. The subject, ideally, should complement the subject of your website. Next, you need to establish a schedule for sending out your publication (e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly), and then, more importantly, you need to meet your deadlines.

If you want to be found in the search engines, it is important that you add search engine optimization to your action list. In a nutshell, search engine optimization—or SEO for short—is the process of making your web pages search engine friendly.

Search Engine Optimization is a relatively new marketing industry. Although there are many purported experts, most of us who call ourselves SEO specialists are learning. The search engines are constantly in flux, so SEO techniques that worked yesterday may not necessarily work tomorrow. As a result, it is exceedingly important to keep up with the fervent pace of the Internet, and the search engines in particular.

Do you find it hard to choose color schemes for your web designs? An effective color scheme can make or break your website. If it doesn't convey the personality you are trying to achieve, you may end up alienating the people you are trying so hard to get to notice you.

In my quest to design successful, attractive websites, I spend a lot of time picking colors. Making sure colors coordinate well with each other is not an easy task. But, with the right tools and a good sense of what looks right, you can achieve the look and feel you desire.

So, you've designed a compelling website that you're eager to show the world. Every day you add fresh content and tweak your pages to make them prettier, more informative and faster to download. It's gonna pay off, you tell yourself, as you upload several new pages to your web server.

Midway in the afternoon, you stop what you're doing to check your traffic reports… You're excited and eager to confirm just how successful your website is. Waiting for your site statistics to finish downloading, your glee turns to dread when you learn that only two people visited your website all day.

What's a disillusioned Webmaster to do?