Web design is vastly more than the creation of a layout and supporting graphic elements. Your web site or web presence is the window through which your customers, prospects and interested parties view your organisation.

Consequently, at the most fundamental level, it involves planning and assembling the right information, in the right quantity to produce a rewarding experience for the user. A web site might also have a number of technically complex elements - a database of products, a secure ordering facility, a real time stock market feed and so on.

The majority of time spent on web site development is not spent coding web pages or producing graphic images. Most time is devoted to determining the arrangement of the information, what that information should be and then obtaining that information. This is because for most web applications a user of the site is seeking information. How that information is structured, located and presented provides a user experience. If that experience is rewarding "I found what I wanted sooner than I thought" then the user forms a positive opinion of the organisation and is likely to become a customer. And if the experience is unrewarding or negative the user is likely not only to not return but also to tell others not to bother.

A web site must reflect the corporate or organisational identity. This sounds obvious but is frequently ignored - sacrificed to a new graphic design that does little more than delay the page loading. We dont suggest that graphic design is not important - for a particular site it may provide the precise emotionally charged message required - but graphic elements must be used appropriately and not subsume the other components of web design.