Here are the critical points to keep in mind:

Look and Feel

What message does the website you’re designing convey? Will the website communicate your brand well? Will it resonate with your target audience? Remember – you aren’t designing a website for yourself – you’re designing it for your existing and potential customers. Putting yourself in their shoes can be a difficult task and that’s where an experienced agency can be a good partner when you’re undertaking website design. They will have a fresh, unbiased perspective and should be well versed in what will appeal to your ideal customer.

SEO

Assuming you want your website to rank high on search engines, and you should, then designing your website with SEO in mind is crucial. Search Engine Optimization comes through paying attention to many different factors, but they all have trust and relevancy in common. When designing the website, the primary headlines on each page need to have your most searched for keywords in them and the descriptions for your images need to use those same words and should be built in when designing your website. To reach a critical mass of keyword content, you may also need to add blogs, and then continue to add to them so your website remains up-to-date as far as search engines are concerned. Backlinks are a factor that is often overlooked, and this is a little more specialized. Basically, keyword-laden articles are written and submitted to “trusted” online destinations that if accepted, provide links back to your website. These backlinks help demonstrate that your site is considered trustworthy. Another way relevance is gauged is by the amount of traffic that your website generates. As you climb in the search engine rankings, your traffic will naturally increase, but you should consider helping the traffic along with links from social media back to your website, as well as paid advertising that can generate website visits. This traffic will signal to the search engines that your site is trustworthy and relevant, and will help you rise in the rankings faster.

Functionality

All the good looks and words won’t matter if the site doesn’t load quickly or doesn’t work well on all devices when it’s designed, including phones. Not only do the spiders measure this, potential customers don’t have the patience to wait while your website loads if it takes more than a couple of seconds, or if it doesn’t translate well on their phone, since that is how most people access information now. 

All of these areas need to work in concert when designing your website, and the right agency partner can help ensure that happens.