There’s so much more to successful web design than first meets the eye. Under the bonnet are the countless critical components of success. These components are often out of sight and therefore out of mind to many business owners. That is of course until you notice that things aren’t quite happening as you expected, that your site isn’t enjoying the numbers of visitors you wanted and that those visitors aren’t in fact turning into the hoards of happy high spending customers that you had foreseen.

It’s only then, when time has passed, money been spent and high hopes dashed that businesses start to really look beyond the aesthetic, the imagery and the funky graphics to discover the hidden aspects of web design that make or break online success. Don’t fall into this trap; don’t be seduced by the bright lights, the chic and sheen of a new site design. Get things right from the off by understanding that to achieve anything approaching a sustainable and profitable online presence your site needs to enjoy good search engine placement on the sorts of search terms that your potential customers are using. It’s your SEO (search engine optimisation) that will define your success. It’s not pretty pictures, snazzy fonts or cool Flash intros that win you business. If you want to win online, you need to be found – the only way you can achieve this is through cool, calm and collected SEO.

Your site design and SEO strategy needs to simultaneously address both the search engine’s requirements and your prospective human audience needs. It should include plenty of fresh, informative content on-site and distributed webwide to stimulate inbound links. Your copy should guide, advise, entertain and persuade. It even needs to extend to your tags in the form of well-conceived page titles, descriptions and anchor text.

It goes without saying that you want you web site design to look good and to ‘feel’ good – all first impressions count. As a 24/7 representation of your company it’s important that people get the right impression. It would be foolish to completely ignore the aesthetic. Alongside the aesthetics, though, it’s vital that you are putting the pieces in place to build ongoing, online profits.

Any professional web design company will be fully aware of the need to integrate fundamental SEO into their work and will place a premium on quality content. The more importance they place on raising profile, the more inclined you should be to use them. Ask them.