Seth Godin has a pretty great formula for putting together a successful website.
I wish I had his blog post, Q&A: What works for websites today?, to refer to when I was designing a website eighteen months ago.
It’s really hard to juggle the aesthetics and the expectations of the client but what marketing professionals know is that our personal investment (and that of the brand) doesn’t mean a thing.
What matters is what the people who visit your website think, and ultimately if you build a user-friendly site with rich, useful content you’ll find success.