Smart webmasters look for a simple, seo friendly and effective website. It often seems tough to achieve all the points at the very first design. But it is the goal that most of the webmasters try to achieve as soon as possible. Here are some tips that may help:

It is important to understand what is the basic logic of the website? Business logic presented in simple terms is more important that making the website beautiful with ornaments. The basic purpose of design is to navigate the readers to the content rather than making them appreciates the design itself.

There is no point in adding functions after functions if it is not needed or if it is used seldom. Sometimes good web design follows the process of elimination rather than selection. In this process you eliminate unnecessary items rather than adding more elements. A seasoned webmaster is great at this process.

Before you add an element to your website, be sure that at least 25% of your users will use this element. Just asking yourself about each of the elements (may be a design or code or content) again and again is immensely necessary while building up a site. However, it should be backed by proper user experience measurement. The next tusk is to try to combine elements, if possible. Just look for the pages that can be combined into one. To simplify the stylesheets, try to adjoin the styles. If the website is not simple enough, there must be some elements that can be combined together and yet kept simple. 

Find out weather your website is consistent. The backend of your website should be as neat as the frontend. It is a general tendency of many designers to focus on the design of the frontend of the site while ignoring a clean code. Some sites look simple in the frontend and at the same time is just a mess in the backend. Be careful about the markup that is used in your site while making it as simple as it can be. Thus try to compose a good one, a standard and compliant markup (don’t forget to validate the code).  It could be useful to limit the number of stylesheets or the JavaScript count that is used for the site. 

Another important step is to choose a proper CMS since that holds the backbone of your site. Try to avoid the CMS that is really complicated. Some sites might be benefited out of the complexity of the CMS though it causes death for lots of sites. Try to find out the CMS that functions according to your need. Otherwise go for the one that allows you to turn on and off as required.