The way you have your website designed is going to influence your online business and how much of a profit you are able to generate from it. There is so much competition online these days that you have to offer a nice looking website or consumers are going to find another one that will. There are some common elements you want to have in place for your website so that it will be profitable for you.
Most consumers are very impatient and they wont wait long for a web page to open up. If you are using animation or Flash to impress consumers you may find it isnt working well because they arent waiting around long enough for it to open up. You generally have three seconds or less before they will go to another website that does open quickly. Since you will likely have links to various web pages, make sure that they can always access the homepage from any of these pages.
It doesnt matter how good the information is on your website if consumers cant read it. Take the time to choose a reasonable size of font and discover colors that work well together. I recently visited a website that had good information but I couldnt concentrate on it because the background was green...