The best place to get some ideas is by seeing what your competitors or other similar sites have.  Do a search on Google using keywords that you would expect to bring people to your site -- and see what is out there.  We recommend you visit several sites and keep notes on the features you like/dislike.   It is much easier for a designer to understand what you want if you can give them an example and then tell them what is different.

Use a good mix of graphics and text on your pages -- avoid long pages of just text! Many people are still on slow modems, so limit yourself to about 50K - 75K bytes of graphics per page. Your home page (the first page people see when visiting your site) should have a catchy graphic, a succinct paragraph on what you have to offer, and most importantly -- a clearly laid out set of hyperlinks (the underlined text on a web page which moves the person to another page and/or site).

Effective use of links allows the visitor to ignore material they already know or are not interested in reading. The most common error is not to include a consistent navigation bar at either the top or side of all your pages.  Think of your home page as a combined magazine cover and table of contents, leading people through the rest of your site.