Important First Steps with Webpage Design.
You have to know that there are many businesses that are rivals to yours and that they have good sites.
You have to design your site in away that it will attract customers to check out your business because the eyes eats first and so if the look of your site is not appealing then no customer will check it out.
Note that for your site appeal customers it has to be user friendly. Don't mix colors too much and choose the colors that blends with each other. And don't list products that are not good on your site. Be sure not to put anything that will scare customers way.
You have many choices when you start building a website, and you can make good choices or not so good ones. A site that will be used for promotions and online business is another matter altogether as far as the design goes. We will talk about the more important considerations for website design that must not be ignored.
Make Best Use of 404 Pages: People reach 404 pages when they type in something incorrectly in trying to find something on your site. Now, what does this have to do with effective web designing? What makes this important is that your 404 page, at least the default one, is a useless page where your visitors can't learn/buy/sign up for anything. You should instead spend some time to design a custom 404 page where the visitor is presented with a number of options so that he/she finds a way back to your website. This one step can get you lots of visitors who would have left otherwise, perhaps assuming your site was not active. There's no one right way to custom design your 404 page; just make it a direct path to your site and you can't go wrong. User-Friendly Content Placement: You want your visitors to be able to look at your content and naturally start reading it; if it's not laid out in a pleasing manner, however, people won't want to bother. You want all of your pages to have content that's neat and easy to understand. Too much unbroken text can be exhausting and off-putting, so use white space as much as possible to create a more open feeling. If you have a site that offers lots of information in the form of content, you want to be sure that it's not overwhelming to visitors. If your site is pleasing to the eyes, people will be more inclined to look it over thoroughly and spend some time there.
Use Alternate Domains: In order to protect your brand and ensure that your website is found by your target audience, you should register alternate domain names or multiple versions of your domain name with various extensions. This protects you against other people who will want to take advantage of your success with similar domain names. Although it isn't actually a part of your website's design, this step can help you protect yourself against losing important visitors. Then all you do is re-direct everything to your main site (it's what big companies do when they want to increase brand awareness for their websites). For example, don't just limit yourself to the .com--you need the .org and .net as well so that you're covered in the three most popular extensions. This can also help you make sure that there isn't any domain extension competition in the search engines. Remember that the overall impression people have of your website will be the sum total of every small decision you make, so nothing should be ignored when it comes to designing your site.
Include RSS Auto-Discovery: In case you offer an RSS feed for the content of your website (most of the sites do offer it and if you don't, you should), make sure you include the auto-discovery code in the website's header. This makes it easier for the different browsers and RSS readers to automatically find your feed and let people know that they can use it. RSS feeds are great because they allow readers to keep up with content updates and website changes and this one tiny feature can make a major difference in your website.
If you cant design a good web site with the above listed features, then be careful in choosing a good web designer
that will give you more than you need because at times it is good to have more than less.
Good luck and Happy design................