Creating an effective website is more than just creating a snazzy look.  These days, designers may be quick to create sites that provide fancy graphics, smooth transitions, and other nice-to-look-at features.  And this is good, because first impressions are important.  But they aren’t everything. 

In fact, a fancy and professionally designed website will not guarantee an increase in your business.  Furthermore, focusing more energy on the look of your site rather than the content will not perform well for your business at all.

How is this so?

Presenting item A: SEO. 
For the non-techie people, this means “search engine optimization.”  Search engine optimization is the process of creating content, tags, linking, and other non-design elements that increase traffic to your site and improve your Google/search engine rankings.  This is done via targeted content, carefully selected key words, and meta keywords/meta tags in the HTML code.

Presenting item B:  Content
Sometimes even if the SEO is good, the content itself will actually cause zero increase in your conversion rates.  What is website conversion?  Website conversion is the process of creating website traffic into actual business.  Good content is an essential part of this process.  You only have seconds to make an impression and engage your readers with your content; if you have attracted the traffic but lose them at the first page of your site, you have a problem.

Presenting item C:  Layout
A good website presents material in a way that is easy to scan, is well organized, and allows the visitor to quickly locate the information they are most interested in.  If you are targeting several different markets, it is key that every type of client from every type of market can quickly find the information they are looking for.  Ideally, from the home page.

Creating an effective website is one of the most important things you can do to increase your business.  Invest well.