Ten Characteristics of an Outstanding Website

1. A memorable identity: develop a clear, consistent message, a theme that is unique to you.
2. New content: To generate repeat traffic, change something on your Website at least once a month (a headline, monthly feature, blog posts, special offer).
3. Something of value: Make your content informative, entertaining, inspirational, educational, or provocative. Be generous; give stuff away.
4. Appeal to search engines: Research and use Meta tags and keywords to help search engines and Web surfers find you.
5. Link exchanges: Find complementary sites to link to and have them link back to your site.
6. Interactivity: Provide a way for visitors to comment or provide feedback.
7. Consistency with other social media: Be sure your identity on social networking sites, blogs, newsletters, and articles reflects the same person and style.
8. Graphics: A picture is worth 1,000 words; 1,000 words are too many for Web surfers to wade through.
9. Ease of bookmarking: Use widgets to ask people to bookmark certain Web pages to Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, and other bookmarking sites.
10. A way to capture e-mail addresses: Use a mailing list service to collect e-mail addresses to send out announcements, special offers, or a newsletter.