Why should a website look good? Why should it look professional? Because your website reflects upon you and your business. You owe it to yourself to make your website look top-notch. To succeed, you'll need some artistic flair.

Look at IBM's homepage. It is a well-designed page, but it isn't "graphics heavy" and doesn't take a long time to download.

Notice:

• The site is clean and understated, not gaudy or in-your-face. Few colours with lots of white space contribute to this light, airy feeling.
• The page is designed with coloured cells of HTML tables that take practically no download time. Most of the parts that are blue, black, dark grey, and light grey are table cells.
• Graphics are few. The largest is a gif image 25K in size. Other gif images are small, with some reusable "go" and "search" buttons.
• The left-side menu is text.
• The navigation system consists of:
  1. left-side menu,
  2. site search in the top right corner,
  3. four major categories in the black bar at the top,
  4. solutions (browse by industry), services, and shopping in the grey blocks,
  5. recent news releases,
  6. selected popular products highlighted with graphics,
  7. company-oriented menu in a black bar in the bottom left corner.
• Photographs contribute to the classy, professional look. Photos can be very effective on business websites.

Some graphic designers like to build sites with lots of graphics. They have fast LAN or DSL connections and have no idea how long their sites take to download on a 56K modem. Try to keep the homepage to 60K maximum, counting the file sizes of all the graphics and the HTML. It's a hard, but an important exercise. Resist a designer's yen to show off his skills. Quick loading -- that's important.

Bear in mind that everything you do has some effect on your visitor's perceptions of your company, her state of mind, and her emotional response. One of your best website investments will be in a few excellent, royalty-free stock photos. Well composed photos add a touch of class to your webpages. They provide a visual centre of interest in an otherwise plain webpage. They add spice and colour.

You don't want just dull pictures of business people in suits. To create a sense of energy and maximum effort, you might use a theme of photos from competitive sports, for example. Use your imagination.

In three sentences, describe how do you plan to achieve the professional look and feel that your website needs.