When creating new website everyone wants to make it unique and pretty. I don’t see any problems with it as long as “beautiful design” does not hurt your website in the long run. There are thousands of designers out there who can create great graphics but have no idea how to make a website:

• user friendly
• search engine friendly

Here are some basic guidelines you should follow to satisfy both - human visitors and search engine spiders.

Let’s start with human visitors…
They are the primary target and will define if your site worth to look at. Your goal is to get them interested from the first visit and willing to come back for more information again and again…

Make your site to load as fast as possible

Two major elements that slow down your website are images and external scripts. Always slice background images to the smallest elements possible and optimize them for web.
If you have more than one script powering up your website, like blog and directory for example - create one common “images” folder and use it for both templates. (more…)