It's a question that has been asked many times and debated many times over and over again. Why does the look of my website matter? It's the age old discussion of what actually "makes" a good website. With buzz words such as, SEO, original content, clean design, and "visually engaging", it is easy to see how confusing just having a website can be.

Through my experience in web design, graphic design and internet marketing, I have found that overall a website that is designed properly is of utmost importance. Now, of course there are many different website designs out there from plain to flashy flash animated. When I hear that a client wants a website to "look better" but "not flashy", that usually means they want to see a clean business design. Often times it is band sites that want the busy flash animation.

Ultimately, the main point of a website is two fold. One being to get across a message about your product, service or "person", and the other is to grab that visitor visually and make them want to continue looking around your site. If your website is designed badly, you don't stand a chance at getting people to really dig into your site.  A good place to find website templates is Best Damn Website Templates.  They offer high end professional templates for low prices.  They are highly customizable and are designed to be in accordance to all web standards.

I've seen sites that have high google rankings and incredible Alexa rankings because the site is flooded with great content. The problem with that is that even though people are coming to the site, they aren't sticking around because the site navigates terribly and it looks like it was designed in the early nineties.

The most important part aside from great content on your website is the way your site looks. Ask yourself if it hurts the eyes to look at or if you get lost trying to navigate around your site. Are the colors too bright? Are the fonts hard to read? Are the graphics professional looking or do they look like a second grader made them? 

These are just a few thoughts to get you started on the road to understanding why a professional website design is important for the success of your website. Below we will cover more ground and go into specific details about how your website should look and what your visitors will respond to in a positive way.

Many marketing gurus have tested the theory of color on websites. What makes a customer want to click on a link or click that ever important "Buy Now" button. If you are selling a product on your ecommerce website, you will definitely want the colors to be subtle and not harsh to the eyes. Reds are typically seen as bad colors because the human braind associates the color with danger. Yellow is also seen as a cautionary color, and people don't seem to want to press that buy now button if there is any reason for caution.

Colors that work well and encourage a customer or visitor to keep clicking around your site are blues, greens and grays. A good site to look at for a friendly color scheme is delicious.com. The site is clean, easy to navigate and the color scheme is nice on the eyes. Typically the use of 3 colors for business websites is the way to go. Often times a website for a rock band can have black and other contrasting colors. Remember that your website should convey the feel of your audience and they will continue to come back again and again.

Google, Yahoo and other search engines love what they term "original content".  Google states that they want the search results that appear on their search engine to offer the user a "unique browsing experience".  Now, the actual meaning of that description is highly debated, but we know the basic meaning. 

That means google wants your website content to offer something different or "not copied" from another website.  This doesn't mean that two shoe companies cannot sell the same shoes and appear in the same google search for the term "cool new shoes".  This simply means that both sites must word their product description uniquely and not exactly the same.  This is to avoid a show site copying Nike.com or Zappos.com and riding on their success and exact content to get customers. 

So the lesson here is to be creative with your original content.  This will increase your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) success and get your website more visitors.  Also, a good rule of thumb is to make sure that your meta tag keywords are specific and as original as possible.  Also make sure to visit google webmaster tools for more tools to increase your website traffic and open up the doors of your site to the world of high return searches from major search engines.

Choosing a website template is probably one of the most important decisions you will make for your product or company. First you will want to ask yourself why you would want to choose a website template over hiring a designer to design one from scratch. There are many advantages to buying a web template.

The first and probably most important reason to choose a website template design is because you can get an idea right away as to what your site will look like. This takes away much of the guess work that a designer might have if they are starting the design from scratch.

Most templates are made with professional and visual graphic design elements already in mind. A good template will be created in accordance with correct web standards and SEO optimization already installed. Also, a good website template will also be easy for a designer to customize and add or change anything that you might need in addition to what is already designed.

Possibly more important, there are many professional website templates out there today that are under sixty dollars. This means you can easily afford to purchase the template and also hire a designer at a cheap rate to customize it to your needs.

If you are a blogger, you probably use a blogging platform such as wordpress, typepad, blogger.com or even drupal. A good source for a wordpress template and other websites templates is best damn website templates.com. Check out their huge and always growing selection of business templates and other web templates at a great price.