When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

1) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

3) Have a simple and clear navigation

You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

4) Have a clear indication of where the user is

When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!

5) Avoid using audio on your site

If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they’re not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it — volume or muting controls would work fine.

• VideoDownloader – Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion, Pornotube… and other 60+ video sites! And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc).
• StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for browsing, reviewing and sharing great sites with like-minded people. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.
• del.icio.us Bookmarks – This extension integrates your browser with del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web. It does this by augmenting the bookmarking functionality in Firefox with an enhanced experience.
• Greasemonkey – Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.
• Yoono – Yoono instantly suggests similar sites, blog notes and people sharing the same interests while you are surfing, for each page you open. Zero effort required – no more tagging, typing keywords or changing interface.
• Firefox Companion for Kodak EasyShare Gallery – Organizing and sharing your pictures is easier than ever with Firefox Companion for Kodak EasyShare Gallery. Upload photos directly to your Kodak EasyShare Gallery, all within your browser. Drag, drop and arrange pictures adding photo titles, and create albums by multi-selecting photos – all of this without interrupting your Internet browsing.
• DownloadHelper – DownloadHelper is a tool for web content extraction. Its purpose is to capture video and image files from many sites.
• Performancing – Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right in your Firefox browser and lets you post to your blog easily. You can drag and drop formatted text from the page you happen to be browsing, and take notes as well as post to your blog.
• LinkedIn Companion – LinkedIn is an online network of more than 7.5 million experienced professionals. LinkedIn helps you be more effective in your daily work and opens doors to opportunities by helping you develop and manage your network of business contacts.
• Fast Video Download – Fast Video Download can save embedded video files from video-hosting servers.

• IE Tab – Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox. This is a great tool for web developers, since you can easily see how your webpage displayed in IE with just one click and then switch back to Firefox.
• Fasterfox – Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.
• StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon lets you “channelsurf” the best-reviewed sites on the web. It is a collaborative surfing tool for browsing, reviewing and sharing great sites with like-minded people. This helps you find interesting webpages you wouldn’t think to search for.
• Map+ – View a map of a selected address in Firefox without changing windows or tabs using the right click command.
• Tab Mix Plus – Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.
• Yoono – Yoono instantly suggests similar sites, blog notes and people sharing the same interests while you are surfing, for each page you open. Zero effort required – no more tagging, typing keywords or changing interface. Let Yoono bring you the best that others have discovered.
• PDF Download – Allows to choose if you want to view a PDF file inside the browser (as PDF or HTML), if you want to view it outside Firefox with your default or custom PDF reader, or if you want to download it!
• BlueOrganizer – The blueorganizer is smart browsing and personalization technology for Firefox. It makes the browser aware of everyday objects like books, movies, wines, restaurants and much more. The blueorganizer helps you automatically collect these object from many popular sites, manage them and instantly find related information.
• Firefox Showcase – Showcase provides a new way to manage your Firefox tabs and windows by showing them as thumbnails in a single window, tab or sidebar. Includes a find bar that will filter the thumbnails, and the capability to select the thumbnails in the same way you would select files in your system.
• Mouse Gestures – Allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard.