Having an understanding of the type of people who visit your site is imperative your site’s success because you can gain information and use it to enhance your site to suit them. This process will encourage loyalty to your visitors, giving you assurance that they will come back again and again for more.

What is the age level and what kind of knowledge does your audience have? A layman might linger around a general site on gardening, but a professional botanist might turn his nose at the very same site. Similarly, a regular person will leave a site filled with astronomy abstracts but a well educated university graduate will find that site interesting.

Take your audience’s emotional state into consideration when building your site. If a very irritated visitor searches for a solution and comes across your site, you will want to make sure you offer the solution right up front and sell or promote your product to him second. In this approach, the visitor will put his trust in you for offering the solution to his problems and is more likely to buy your product when you offer it to him after that.

When you design the layout for your site, you have to take into account the characteristics of your audience. Are they older or younger people? Are they looking for trends or are they just looking for information served without any icing on the cake? For example, introducing a new, exciting game with a simple, straightforward black text against white background page will definitely turn prospects away. Make sure your design suits your site’s general theme.

Trying on a conversational approach in your sites in moderation will more likely create a sense that your visitors are on common ground with you, enabling trust to be built in the relationship between you and your audience, which will come in handy when it is time to market a product to them.

Custom built and professionally done websites don’t come cheap. You should be prepared to dish out at least a few hundred, if not thousands of dollars. However, this changes if you know where to find the great deals, the best designs for the lowest price. Here’s a simple guide:

Foremost, you must understand that it is a rip off to get companies to design websites for you. You may be very familiar with newspaper classifieds that offer a 5-page website at $500. These companies are established companies with physical locations, therefore they cannot go below the amount they charge to pay off overhead. Office rent, designer’s wages, advertising costs, office supplies and the list goes on.

Consequently, it would be wise to find freelance designers or web developers. These untapped resources are mostly working from home so they do not have a soaring operation costs like that of a physical company. On the other hand, they will be able to design images with the same quality as those of designers from big companies, after all, they have the same skills. All in all, this is a no-brainer.

It is very important, however, to choose freelancers with care. The best way to do this would be to go to freelance websites. There are several to choose from. You can try elance.com, rentacoder.com or getafreelancer.com. Do a quick search and you will be able to find more. There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project. This way, you are sure to get the best deal. On top of being able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured, these freelance websites also offer protection to you as the customer. There is process that allows you to file a dispute is something bad happens to your project.

You can also take the other route and build your website yourself. Think about it. If you only need 5 simple pages to present some simple information, why waste hundreds of dollars for it when you can spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself? You do not need years of studying programming to do it! If you have a computer and can handle basic applications like Microsoft Word, with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, you’ll be able to design your own websites even if you do not know a single line of HTML.

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.