You need to portray a professional brand identify on the internet. A badly designed site will immediately give a bad impression of your company. Even if your products are of the highest quality, all people have seen is an inferior site.
Expectation of site design is very high these days as people are used to large online shops or services like eBay and Amazon. This does not mean your website design needs to be complex or indulgent. On the contrary, design is often about simplicity!
The BBC recently reported on research showing that the brain makes decisions on the quality of a website within just a 20th of a second of viewing the first webpage.
The researchers also believed that these quickly-formed first impressions last, so unless the first impression is favourable you will lose customers.
There is a whole section dedicated to design on this website.
