What a web site needs to achieve in order to be successful can be summarized in two paragraphs:

Putting the message across / Selling your product

Compare a web site to a shop. A shop has to be attractive when you see it otherwise you will not walk in. Once you are inside, the atmosphere needs to be pleasant otherwise you will not want to spend time in it and will not be in the mood to appreciate the products it offers. It is also important that the customer can find easily what he or she is looking for otherwise they will go to another shop.
A web site is the same: if the site is ugly, people will not want to go in and have a look. They will get irritated by long download times, flashing things and inappropriate music, They will get even more irritated if they have difficulties finding what they are looking for. In the end, it is maybe better to have no web site than to have a badly designed one because a bad web site is giving the message: “Look how unprofessional we are!”
In practical terms a web site needs to be user friendly, clear and easy to navigate. It needs to present good information about your product and make the visitor want to “buy” the product or use your services.
Many web sites, possibly the majority, fail to do so.

Be easy to find

There are well over 5.000.000.000 web pages in the world. There are hundreds of millions of web sites. This means that you have to take some steps to make your web site known and easily found by people looking for your product.
It is possible (and often advisable) to use judiciously placed paid advertising on other related sites but the best way to make a web site known is to obtain a good search engine placement in the major search engines. And it is free!
Long gone are the days when simply registering a site would ensure a good placement in a search engine. These were the days (until about 6 years ago) when there were only a few competing sites and you would be well placed no matter what your site looked like (to a search engine which is absolutely not the same as what it looks like to a human). People still think that having an appropriate domain name and a list of keywords meta tags is enough. The truth is that keyword tags are totally ignored by Google, Alta Vista, Fast, Teoma, Lycos and Yahoo which comprise well over 90% of search engine use. The strategies to get a good placement are now far far more complex (whole books are written about it) and if you do not use them, very few people will find your site. No visitors = no internet business.
Search Engine Optimisation is a major consideration when we create a new web site. We can also optimise your existing site so that will achieve better rankings in search results.