Before you even consider what qualities make up a good website design, you need to ask yourself why you want a website. It is for ecommerce where you can sell all over the world, a front for your business so people know how to contact you, just a web presence as you feel you should seeing we are in the digital era, or a website for blogging. Whatever you need your website for, the design qualities behind it are always going to be the same.

There are a number of factors that should always be consider with website design, and these factors are very influential as to whether someone decides to stay on your website or 'bounce' straight off it, meaning that as soon as someone sees your website home page to which other landing page you have, they for one reason or another decide to leave it.

The first one that I think is the most important, is how your designer structures your homepage, I always tell my clients that your home page is like the shop window if you were to own a physical shop, and how you design your home page determines whether people will want to explore the website further.

Make sure your website design for the home page is not too cluttered. If you have a home page that has many different form of media such as text, photos, video and bi images, potential customers are not going to know where to go first. You need to make sure your 'calls to action' which is what you want people to do when they get to your site, whether it be buy something, sign up for something or comment on a blog post, are clear and concise. A good web designer knows this and will make sure that if you want lots of different mediums as mentioned above, that they all compliment and flow with each other.

Another factor for good website design is the style of text you go for throughout the whole site. If you choose a very basic text and then keep it the same with no headers or dynamic slogan, then the whole site is going to look very boring, and frankly like you couldn't care. Putting thought into which text is best for your site will show people that you care about the message you are trying to give with your website.

Colours are another very important factor with website design. I have seen so many garish websites that have actually made me want to click off the site straight away! However, the opposite end of the scale is when all the different pages, no matter how important they are, are in the same dull colour. Make your 'selling' page the most prominent and give it some real kick so people know what they are meant to do on your site. It sounds silly but the old adage 'don't make me think' really helps with websites.

Make sure your social media campaigns don't interfere with your website design. Time and time again, I have seen brilliant looking websites, to be ruined by a huge 'like me' Facebook button, or a Twitter feed which although effective, the person doing the tweets is not sticking to their profession and goes off topic so you have a Twitter feed on your home page completely irrelevant to your product or website. It is vital to have a social media campaign to support your site, but make sure that's what it does; support! Make sure it doesn't dominate!

Keep your website design current! Dependant on your budget, make sure that you can periodically update your website so that images are current and special offers are not stale and out of date. A massive error i see many sites doing it keeping their Christmas campaigns on their home page way into February! February may not sound that late to you, but to me it says that the owner of the website can't be bothered to update their site, so why should i give this site the time of day!