All graphics should be sharp, colorful, and load reasonably quickly. We were neighbors once at a show with a very talented guy who put up a website a couple years ago. One morning he told me that he couldn't understand why the site wasn't doing anything for him. We timed the page as it loaded, and gave up after 6 minutes. After one minute, with every passing second you lose more viewers.
Chances are only one in a hundred people even stayed around long enough to see the work.
The number of returns is simply overwhelming. Rule Number 10 Learn everything you can about search engines. When your site was uploaded to the WWW, either you or your website designer should have submitted your URL to the major search engines so your pages can be indexed. The best tutorial site that we have found is Search Engine Watch - study it for all it is worth. Rule Number 11 Get as many links leading to your site as possible.