This is the second part in our series on how to build a professional website. It takes a lot of work to build a website from scratch that's capable of being your sole source of income and it's all the little things that make the difference between a website succeeding or failing. The goal of this series is to help readers avoid several of the more common mistakes and start out on the right path to success. In the previous part we covered how to find a great domain name. In this part, we're looking at design.

Making sure your site has an excellent design is extremely important and for more reasons than you may think. Here are a few:

1. It's the first impression you make on your visitors and often determines whether they stick around to find out more.

2. It makes a strong impression on how credible you are. Even if you are an individual running this site by yourself, that typically isn't the impression you want to leave on your visitors. A professional design can make visitors feel there is a much larger organization behind this site.

3. It makes visitors feel safe. I can't count the number of times I've shied away from making a purchase on a site or from giving them my contact information because of a bad design. It leaves the impression the site is just out to make a quick buck and has probably put as little effort into securing my data as they did the design. That's assuming the whole site isn't a scam to begin with.

4. It improves conversion rates. There is more to a good design than just looking nice. It should help funnel your visitors towards the product you're trying to sell and make it easy for them to find the information they are looking for. This makes for happier visitors and a happier website owner.

There are lots of common mistakes people make when designing a site. The website WebPagesThatSuck.com highlights a lot of them, but usually it comes down to people insisting on designing the site themselves. I don't care how good you are with Photoshop, unless you are actually a professional designer, you're better off swallowing your pride and letting someone else do the design.

Use Two Designers

This may seem counter intuitive, but don't use the same person to design both your logo and website. There are excellent logo designers who don't make very good websites and vice-versa. If you hire someone to do both, you'll most likely end up with mediocre results.

The two biggest mistakes people tend to make on their logo are trying to cram too much into it or on the other extreme, adding no styling whatsoever. Your logo should be SIMPLE and elegant, preferable with a graphical element that helps to convey what it is you do, rather than simply looking cool. It should be something that can appear on a black or white background with minor or no changes and something that still looks nice when printed in black and white. Also make sure it is designed in a vector graphics format that can be scaled indefinitely, such as with Adobe Illustrator. A simple gif or jpg may look nice on your website but with become pixilated and distorted if you try to enlarge it later on.

Website

Wait until your logo is complete before having your website designed. This will give your designer a great starting point when it comes to knowing what kind of style and colors to go with. Before handing anything off to your designer you should already have a very good idea of what kind of content your site is going to contain, what the navigation structure will look like, what the key areas are you want to drive visitors to, what to highlight on your home page, etc. Hopefully you did all this before even making the final decision to launch this website. Document all this and provide it to your designer so that he/she knows what your goals are and can design a site to suite those. Trying to cram these in after the design is done usually doesn't result in a site you are happy with.

You want to make sure your site will look nice at most resolutions so it should be designed to be no more than 1,000 pixels wide so that it fits nicely at 1024×768 resolutions. It should also elegantly fill any remaining space for visitors with higher resolutions. Flash elements on the page are ok, but avoid designing the whole site in flash or you're likely to have problems getting search engine traffic down the road. Also be sure to design something that your visitors will be ok with visiting every day without becoming annoyed. This means avoid using a lot of animations, videos that automatically play, sound or anything else that is likely to become annoying after the first few times.

How to Find Designers

There are many great designers out there, but there are many more bad and mediocre ones and finding the right one can be quite difficult. I would suggest avoiding most design firms. They typically mark the price up significantly from what the designer is being paid which means you either end up overpaying, or the work gets sent over to a designer who works very cheaply and probably isn't the best. The best finds are usually professional designers who do some work on the side, apart from their day job. You should expect to pay between $1,000 – $4,000 for your design when you go this route and it's worth every penny.

Finding the right designer is going to require a fair amount of work on your part. You can start by just doing a Google search, looking at other sites you like (there is often a link to the designer at the bottom of the page), posting a project at RentACoder.com or asking for references from others. Regardless of which route you take, be sure to look over their portfolio to make sure they consistently produce great results. You don't want a designer who is hit and miss.

Another great option is 99 Designs. This is by far my favorite and one of the more affordable options. They allow you to post a design contest which dozens of qualified designers typically compete in, providing you with 50-100+ designs to choose from. You choose a single winner who is awarded the prize money and hands over the license to the design. This allows you to see several ideas and you usually end up with a design you really love. Be sure to provide as much info as possible up front and feedback on exactly why you like or dislike each design so you can steer the contest towards a design you are going to be happy with. Again, remember to post your logo design and site design projects separately.