A great website has to be readable. Don't use language that no one will understand; make your content easy to understand, engaging, and simple. You want your content to flow from one paragraph to the next, from one page to the next, etc. It shouldn't be a pain in the butt to read.
One thing you can do is use a friendly font but not a silly font, like comic sans. Your font choice is a bigger deal than we like to realize as well. A text size of 14 pixels is often a good way to go. A nice tool to help you with this is Google Web Fonts.As far as navigation, you should have multiple routes to each page. Have links to other pages in the site within the content. Make sure nothing in your site is more than 2 clicks away from any page. Your navigation bar should feature the prominent pages of your site, perhaps all the pages.
The rule of thumb for navigation is to remember that people are impatient and will probably not stick around to figure out your site if you make it too difficult for them. We're human, we don't like to wait.
If you are looking for a quality Chicago marketing firm that does great web design, then contact Integraphix. We are a leading Chicago web design company.
