Additionally, in order to protect your interests and make sure that you always get paid in full, it's wise to create a generic contract that you can customize for each project you work on. 4.Develop a estimating system that allows you to accurately predict your costs and client's costs. There are quite a few means to do this, so take some time to sit down and figure out how to do it for your business. It doesn't have to be anything complex. It could be something as simple as charging per page, etc. But it's important that it's accurate and will allow you to make sure you don't undercharge for projects and put yourself in a jam. Putting all this into practice may take a fair amount of time and money, but once you do, you'll be amazed at how such small changes in way you do business can increase your sales and your effeciency. (By way, you can get much of stuff above from a company called Proposal Kit; just go to www.sybren.net/proposalkit. I bought their "Standard" package and I've been really happy with it.)

Further, spend some time in your graphics program to learn how to create attractive graphics for your website.

Good Example: imc.sybren.net. I don't have to say much here -- just look at site: It's just very appealing and nice looking!

Effective Sales Copy - The sales copy you write is extremely important to success of your site. It should be written with your target market in mind. (Note that if you have a content-based site, this should be replaced with good content instead.)

To make your sales copy work, focus on benifits to customer, not on features. Also, incorporate testimonials. Additionally, unless you're extremely good at writing sales copy, short copy is usually better than long.

Good Example: www.roibot.com. Note effective use of testimonials and how focus is placed on benefits, not features: "1 Submission Expert to Keep Your Pages Fresh in Search Engines"

Appropriate Text Formatting - If you format your text incorrectly your site will, quite frankly, look silly. Throughout your site, try to keep your use of font styles, sizes, and colors consistent as well as avoid too much bolding. This is best illustrated with examples:

Good Example: www.howstuffworks.com. Click on several of articles on this site and notice how they are consistently formatted same. Your content should be formatted consistentely as well.

Bad Example: www.business-opportunity.net/fort5000.htm. Notice all different sizes, colors, and overuse of bolding throughout text. (By way, this example is taken from an article written by Ralph Hilliard of WordNet.net)

Value to Visitor - In order for your site to be valuable to its visitors, it must provide something that they need (be that a product, service, or information). Because not everyone will be interested in what you're offering, most effective way to make your site valuable to your visitors is to target your marketing efforts to right group of people—instead of trying to create a site that has a little bit of something for everyone.

There are some other things you can do, like giving away freebies such as newsletters, eBooks, or articles, but that's a whole different subject. :)

Hopefully brief overview above of these vital elements of a strong website will get you started in right direction. However, in all honestly, this wasn't truly comprehensive. There's much, much more to it (as I'm sure you've probably discovered at this point), but you'll have to figure that out on your own, because I'm done here. :) Best of luck to you!