Don’t Make Me Think author also has a second book out, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, which lists how Joe Webguy can do fairly simple, cheap and effective user testing, from the beginning concept to the end.
I’m personally a big fan of things like card sorting and sketches if you’re in such a beginning phase that you’re wondering which elements should go where on a page and general site architecture. See what your users seem to expect, tend to look for and are willing to do more clicks to get to.
When you say “business and corporate websites”, is the target audience other businesses, or individuals?
- What is best place to put navigation if you are offering some services?
Where people see it, use it, and understand exactly what it is. Assuming you mean there is also a (separate) “website” menu, and possibly a client menu (login/out, shopping cart, profile, etc), and a utility menu…
You test various locations on a mockup. Give your testers tasks where they need to use the product/service menu, and other tasks where they need to use one of the other menus.
Most of the time, sites tend to still put the site-wide menu prominently near the top, but that’s no hard and fast rule.
- Home page should have what elements(like portfolio, services, case studies, Contact Us, Approach etc);
Card sorting can help this. You have little cards (or whatever) with all the main and sub subjects on the website. You can offer different combinations of the cards to your testers, and see where they feel certain subjects belong. This is good for finding out where people might look for something important if it doesn’t have its own menu item (for example they know that to find your street address, ‘Contact’ is a likely place to find it, and would click there to search for that information).
- Should we use contact us form at home page?
Is the primary reason people go to your site to send you a message?
if yes at which area at left hand side or at RHS.
Ask yourself why would that matter, and if it does matter, test on people. Why not in the middle? Do people get confused when they test a page with the form on the right side?
- If we are using slider, should we limit number of image, if yes then upto how much?
Ask yourself why you have a slider in the first place. Is it advertising? Is it just prettying the page? is it meant for devices with crappy memory and crappy internet and crappy Javascript like mobiles or guys living in the boonies? Is it an additional menu (clicking on an image can bring someone to, for example, a case study)? This determines how many images you want in a ‘slider’ (you might mean carousel here, not sure).
- Should sliders be used at inner pages too?
Do you need them there? Do they add value to your site? Do they make the inner page make sense or work better?
- I see many websites have logo at top middle… is it good?
This is mostly a graphic design question. Some people love purple. Some people hate it. Most important is, do all visitors know whose page they are on, and if the logo clicks to home, do people easily find the logo? Pretty much the only thing a logo does is tell people whose site they are on, and how to get home if it follows that web convention.
- How much content should be present at home page to get good visibility, how should they distributed.
This is an information architecture question. You’d ideally have an architect, a content writer/web copywriter and a usability tester all together for this one. Otherwise, you’ll need to test various amounts of content on many people. Where do they stop seeing some vital information? That’s likely when you have too much content stuffed onto one page.
- I believe users generally scan a web page so how to make it most noticeable.
There are many articles floating around the web regarding user scanning. Here’s an example of one. You should also take a look at sites like Baymard Institute, Epic Bagel, UXMatters and UXBooth.
9.Best place for call to action buttons
Lots of articles on this as well… also on how to write the action text, the way to style and colour the buttons… The sites listed above have articles on these. On recent sites I notice a trend (and yeah, it’s a trend… like, graphic design trend) of a large, space-consuming “hero unit” at the top (a big picture for Pretty, with a one-liner describing the site/service/product, followed by a single large action button) and then usually a group (of three though I’ve seen columns as well) of slightly more specific bits or reasons of the product, each with their own action button. (example)
The sites/books listed by Jeff Mott and the ones I listed all have hints, tips and tricks for some of your questions, but ultimately as Ralph said, your specific site, content, and needs, as well as user testing, will determine most of these, because there’s no one set of rules that can really apply to all web sites (there might be a checklist for B2B-type web sites though).