Every professional website that’s successful has one thing in common: good web design. Think about what you do – when you hit a website as a first time visitor, what do you think about or feel? The design of the website is visual and has imagery, and that is the first thing that helps to create our opinions and feelings. Website design impacts whether or not people will check out your site and maybe buy from you. Our conversation will center on what you need to know and get right on your site concerning design.

Isn’t it very obvious that you should take the content on your webpages through a basic spell check? Think about the impression you get from a site that has a lot of words with typos. Even if you do not have a word processor, there are tons of free spell checkers online that are easy to find. This is of course entirely up to you, but eventually it will come back to haunt you. We will stop preaching about this, but it is something we wanted to mention.

Another important consideration are all those boring admin pages such as privacy policies and maybe terms of use, etc. It is well worth the money to buy what you need, and all you do is fill in the blanks and you’re done. An outdated copyright notice may send out the wrong signals to your site visitors and make it look unprofessional, and not having a privacy policy will deter your visitors from giving away their contact information, in case you’re collecting it. If anything unusual happens and having had them saves you in court, then it will be totally worth the hassle.

Of course you need to make sure that your content is the main attraction because it is. The more artistic sites will use Flash, but we have a hard time appreciating Flash in most applications. Flash websites often lack when it comes to traffic and stickiness because search engines can’t read pages that are built in flash, which stops your site from ranking high.

There are speed of loading issues to think about, as well, if you are really determined to have Flash on your site. A Flash splash page is somewhat outdated, and honestly you do not see them used very often. There are a lot of people who prefer to avoid dealing with Flash completely on webpages, so the external link to content may be a good idea.

The more time that goes on the better and better your website will be as you find success and make incremental improvements. The thing is that you need to begin with basic web design elements so that your site won’t lack anything. Web design doesn’t have to be that complicated but people tend to make it that way. In order to get everything you want: lots of visitors, high conversions, lots of repeat sales, a really strong brand, etc–then you need to make sure that you are building a super strong foundation.