Hey Robert,
When you create your own website, you should also take a look at 21 factors to make your website attractive and attract more visitors.
Webpage Design
1. Create a uniform template for webpage and all the colors, fonts, layout according to a certain pattern.
2. Should have About us page on your website.
3. Copyright should be at the bottom of each page.
4. Should design webpage smaller than size 100KB per page.
5. should make the path from the homepage to the secondary webpage
For example: Home> Section > Sub-Section > Page.
Website Layout
6. The important content on the website should be placed above the content less important.
7. Using Div instead of table make your website standard for web 2.0
8. Creating contrast in webpages. For example, black text on white background or white text on black background...
9. Do not use multiple fonts and font sizes on the same Web page.
10. Need to check the display of webpages in many different Web browsers and at different resolutions.
Website Content
11. Use simple words and understandable for people to be able to read your website content.
12. If the page is too long, cut it up into smaller pages, and create links between them.
13. Do not use fonts smaller than 10px and should use percentages instead of pixels thus readers can change font size in their browser.
Analysis Readers
14. Set up a feedback page and put into About Us page.
15 Make a section for latest news updates in the Home Page.
16. should put the questions to get responses from your readers.
Web Links
17. The use of a uniform color for all the links.
18. If your links to a Word, Excel, PDF file then you should create its icon beside the link.
19. Do not create a link to a site under construction.
Images on Website
20. Optimized image size on Web pages smaller and should be used only image format jpg, gif, png.
21. Using functional thumbnails for larger image, while ensuring it can be enlarged if desired.
Above's only my ideas that should consider when designing a website. It will help you improve your website a bit more. Hope it's useful to you