The color scheme of your site should relate to the topic of your content. A law firm wouldn’t want bright, loud colors anymore than an extreme sports club would want peaceful earth tones. If you’re not sure what color scheme is best suited for your site, spend some time doing searches for other sites with similar topics and see what appeals to you. It’s always best to stick to just a few colors.
Keep the page layout simple and consistent. Have a clear, easy to follow navigation. Notice how to your left you can access any section of this site from any other section. Visitors like to hop around, and you want to make the site as easy for them to use as possible. “Next” and “previous” page buttons aren’t enough. The most common complaint from visitors regarding poor navigation is that they once saw content they were interested in revisiting, but were unable to find it again.
Don’t use too many graphics. Unless your content is all about the images, such as for a photography site, keep the images scarce and well placed. While a few well balanced images will make the pages more interesting and appealing to the eye, too many will slow down the load time of the page and distract from your true content. Stay far, far away from using a lot of animated images. Again, while some may be needed to compliment the content, nothing looks more unprofessional than a page full of blinking, jumping animations.
Of course you want your site to be fun for the visitor, but overkill will simply cause fatigue for the visitor. Keeping it simple keeps it clean!