The design of you website is as important as the content. If you know how to design and structure your content, that will definitively help the visitors to keep an eye on what you offer.
No matter what type of services, information, you provide, the appealing is very important.
You can use an old fashion model or stay focus on modern design, as long as it actually highlight the content or service the good way, that will do.
Colors / Fonts
Colors are important, every marketer will play with colors and also font characters and types. Every type of details will make a difference and not only on your website and content but most of all on your ads and banners.
Text
Use the right words to catch the attention at the good spot, this is so important in ads and promotion articles…
Pass a professional certificate of design, keep up..
Template monsters …
WordPress…
Freelancers…
Web development
If you do not use WordPress, Drupal or any other CMS from the list : CMS listing
You might use your own for some reason, speed, optimization, security and you are right, but if you are alone, well it’s a hard job knowing and keeping up with the constantly evolving technics, check out the page about JQUERY, CSS3, HTML5… web development.
Server Administration
Yes this technical part is also important, if you website is appealing but way too slow, do you think visitors will be back and browse all your site !
No you better have a good hosting provider for your CMS, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others are resources consuming, please use a proper provider from the list we provide here : Web hosting review
Tools
+ Design Review+ W3C validation services+ Spider Simulator+ Photos Bank / Images+ Photoshop & Gimp tutorials+ Illustrator & InkScape tutorials