Getting a website designed for personal or professional reasons, your website has got to have your stamp on it. The visitors should instantly know the purpose of the website design and the message to be sent across to your target audience.
It is always better to do a fair amount of research and development before going ahead with the conceptualization of your web design. You can find many interesting websites matching your business domain that can help you incorporate certain latest ingredients that your haven’t thought of till now. But never ever make a copy of an existing website, although you can get some concepts and ideas, but it is considered to be an evil practice to copy some ones web designs.
And moreover, you might be sued by the copyright owner for breaking the copy right of the web design including the images as well as content in web design. Another thing to remember while web designing is to keep your grammar and copy updated and exactly correct to the rules of English language.
Remember that a visitor does not have enough time to read and understand your broken spellings and entangle him in a typo. It is a well known practice to get your website’s content proof read before making it live on the internet. You would obviously want your website to be the best looking one, but usability cannot be sidelined even slightly with web design.
Because the very purpose of your web design is to entice the visitor and provide him the information he is looking for. So, don’t be tempted to use heavy graphics and flash images that could make your website slower then a tortoise.