For any online business, the website is the hub or the virtual representation of the company whether it exists physically or not. When business is done on the World Wide Web, people do not see each other physically like how it is when dealing with a physical company. Naturally, people mostly judge you by your cover. This is where a good design steps in.

Imagine if you are running an offline company. Would you allow your salespersons to be dressed in shabby or casual clothes when they are dealing with your customers? By making your staff wear professional clothing, you are telling your customers that you do care about quality. This works simply because first impressions matter.

This is exactly the same case with your website. If your website is put together shabbily and looks like a 5 minute “quick fix”, you are literally shouting to your visitors that you are not professional and you do not care for quality.

On the contrary, if you have a totally professional looking website layout, you are allowing your visitors to see that you have given meticulous attention to every detail and professionalism is important to you. You show that you are organized, focused and you really mean business.

More importantly, anything related to your company should always be well-designed, not just your website. Business cards, letterheads, promotional brochures, flyers- every little bit matters. As you grow your business, these items that represent you. They simply become the face of your business. Once more, remember the analogy of the “salesperson dressed shabbily”. Keep it in mind and you will always get the point.

The whole point of building a website is thrown away when there no visitors coming in. Search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Altavista, Wikipedia and so on are oftentimes the source of these much-sought traffic. For this reason, designing a search engine-friendly site will make your website rank easily in search engines, resulting to driving more traffic in which translates to more visitors.

Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, read the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of it. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

Use Meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using Meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

Instead of using HTML tags like to style your page, it is wiser to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) because they are more effective. By using CSS, redundant HTML tags are eliminated which then make your pages much lighter and gives it faster time to load.

The usability of your website does not rely on how brilliant your website design is. If there is difficulty in grasping the content of your site, then your site is as useful as an empty shell. What’s the purpose of your website and is it filled with real content? Here are some tips to maximize the usefulness of your website to ensure it functions are served most favorably:

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, it is best to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. While having 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font like what most sites prefer to use as they look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can navigate your site with ease, and make sure they find what they are looking for.

Ensuring that your site loads fast keeps you from losing your visitors. Most internet users leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last but certainly not the least, it pays to test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in upholding your professional image than making sure there is absolutely no broken links, so be very mindful about that.