logo is an important part of your brand, so make sure it's located prominently on your site," says Tiffany Monhollon, senior content marketing manager at online marketer ReachLocal. "Use a high-resolution image and feature it in the upper left corner of each of your pages," she advises. "Also, it's a good rule of thumb to link your logo back to your home page so that visitors can easily navigate to it."

"It's very easy these days to be visually overloaded with images, to the point where our brains stop processing information when confronted with too many options," explains Paolo Vidali, senior digital marketing strategist, DragonSearch, a digital marketing agency. To keep visitors on your site, "make sure pages do not have competing calls to action or visual clutter [e.g., lots of graphics, photographs or animated gifs] that would draw the visitor's eyes away from the most important part of the page." To further keep clutter down on landing pages, "consider limiting the links and options in the header and footer to narrow the focus even further," he says. Another tip to streamlining pages: "Keep paragraphs short," says Ian Lurie, CEO of internet marketing company Portent, Inc. "On most Web sites, a single paragraph should be no more than five to six lines."

"Create enough space between your paragraphs and images so the viewer has space to breathe and is more able to absorb all of the features your site and business have to offer," says Hannah Spencer, graphic designer, Coalition Technologies, a Web design and online marketing agency. "Controlling white space through layout will keep users focused on the content and control user flow," adds Paul Novoa, founder and CEO at Novoa Media. "With a lot of visual competition taking place on the Web and on mobile, less is more. Controlling white space will improve user experience, increasing returns from the website."

Using "a mostly neutral color palette can help your site project an elegant, clean and modern appearance," says Mark Hoben, the head of Web design at Egencia, the business travel division of the Expedia group, who is also a believer in using color wisely. "Employing small dashes of color--for headlines or key graphics--helps guide visitors to your most important content," he explains. It is also important to use a color palette that complements your logo and is consistent with your other marketing materials.

A front-end developer is a web developer that codes the front end of a website. While web design is the way a website looks, front end development is how that design actually gets implemented on the web.

A back-end developer is someone who builds and maintains the technology needed to power the components which enable the user-facing side of a website to exist. Their back end code adds utility to everything the front-end designer creates.

Full stack developers understand how every part of the web development process takes place and can guide on strategy and best practices. These developers will have an increasingly important role in the web development of the future, and are able to look at the 'big picture'. They are knowledgeable with the server side as well as the client side’s user experience.

JavaScript (JS) is a type of web programming language that is supported across all web browsers and tools, and is the language that gives JavaScript developers control and power to create, enhance and modify websites. Even though a JavaScript developer typically works on the front-end, the programming language itself is not limited to front-end use only.

The big question: money. According to PayScale.com, the 2015 median annual pay for web developers is $56K, while the median annual pay for web designers is around $46K. Robert Half Technology offers a more optimistic outlook, citing 2014 survey results to determine a $70-110K annual salary for web developers and $60-$99k annual salary for web designers. However, this is subject to many variables including location, experience, skillsets, and maybe even what you wear for that job interview. Just know there isn’t much salary discrepancy between the two web careers.

Web developers work with programming languages like HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create websites and web applications. They will also most likely utilize other languages to set up email services, user authentication, databases, and other technical aspects of websites. To do this, developers use software like text editors, command line interface, and version control to build the technical information (the code) that will present the data. Web designers are not primarily responsible for knowing how the code works – but making sure it’s aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly for website visitors. They will utilize graphics design software – including products like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Inkscape (an excellent alternative to Photoshop), and GIMP. Ultimately, they will design the layout of the website through constructing prototypes and wireframes. Designers control the flow of information and can even be responsible for website analytics.

A portfolio is very important – whether you’re a developer or designer. Unlike that disclaimer you see on your stock investments, past performance is a pretty good indicator of future performance. A good developer and designer will showcase their skillsets and experience for future employers and clients, but may make use of different services to do this. Developers will primarily rely on GitHub.com to display their awesome repositories of coding work. It’ll demonstrate how well the developer can refactor and abstract their code to be elegant and readable to other developers. Cloud-based website-hosting services like AWS (Amazon) and Heroku.com can be used at times to display static websites and web applications that developers have created. Designers have their own options to show off their ingenuity through websites like Behance.com and Dribble.com. These websites offer the ability to present designers’ expertise in color schemes, graphic design ability, and creativity. Even more important than utilizing these resources is creating a personal portfolio site that you can showcase your work. By creating a personalized website, you have control over how your information is presented and received, without inviting the interference that comes up at times by hosting your content on a third-party website. Nevertheless, don’t neglect these other resources and make sure they are utilized in some capacity.

When drawing the comparison between developers and designers, the “right-brained” (imaginative) vs “left-brained” (logical) comparison is occasionally made. It is said that people who think more linearly and logically are left-brain dominant and will enjoy and be more comfortable with web development, while people who enjoy creativity and possess an artistic nature are right-brain dominant and will flourish in web design. However, there have been studies done that show people don’t have a dominant part of their brain – as Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, “Don’t call me left brained, right brained. Call me human.” Don’t think you’re predisposed to do better in one area than another – an artist can be as proficient at web development as a mathematician can be as creatively skilled at web design. This segues excellently into my final point.

Simply put, if you have your small business website designed by one of the larger design companies or corporations, you will not be talking to the owner of that company. You will be speaking to his/her employees whose job it is to work 9-5, endlessly turning out web pages for an hourly wage. Unless the designer really loves their job, chances are, their only personal investment in what you've hired them to do is to make sure they pick up their paycheck at the end of the month. They do not sit at home at night wondering how John and Mary's woodworking shop is doing. They can't be reached after hours to chat over a great new idea you've had for a sale or promotion. More than likely, if you do ever get to speak to a live human being at one of these firms, you will be talking to a very poorly paid employee in India who will have to try to bring your Username up on a screen to even have an inkling of who you are. For the most part, you will find yourself processed through automated voice messaging systems and truly unhelpful on-line help desks. Not much of a support system to be backing up a business you've put all of your hopes and money into. Basically, the point we are trying to make is that if you go with a big company, you are bound to end up being treated like a number, and we all know how frustrating, and even dehumanizing, that can feel. Many of our clients have gone down this dead-end road before coming to us, and we confess, it makes us feel awfully good to hear how delighted they are to be finally speaking to real people. Though the Internet is all about technology, humans are all about communication, and you need to be able to communicate, one-on-one, with the person whose role in your business is going to be so very important.

It is a common misconception amongst folks who are new to the Internet that you will simply put up the site, end of story. Try to think of it this way: the owner of a supermarket does not build their store, stock it with products and then never replenish the inventory again. Running an on-line business is an on-going process. If your small business will be running an e-commerce site, you will be adding new products, removing old ones, promoting specials and advertising. Even if your website will be purely informational, your site must be in a state of on-going development in order to remain important to search engines (thus gaining good rankings). Informational sites need to add new articles, new lists of resources, new interesting features to make their site useful to their visitors. Because your site will always be 'under construction' so to speak, in hopes of always improving its value to the public, you need to have a web designer who is going to remain available to you for these types of updates.

The answer to this can be summed up in one word: rankings. Build-it-yourself websites are great if your goal is just to have some fun playing with a program that will allow you to easily create a web page with no programming skills. If your intention is to make a personal website about your life, your family, a hobby, and you really don't care if anyone ever finds your site, this is a fine solution. Many such programs are available and they generally won't cost you a lot of money. Unfortunately, they behave like they didn't cost you a lot of money, too. Because these template-based programs are mass produced, what you end up with is a site which not only has not been created to fit your needs, but which has also not been created to meet the needs of customers or the search engines. Most of the do-it-yourself web templates out there are built with absolutely no regard for SEO (search engine optimization) standards, and because of this, they will not rank well in Google, Yahoo or MSN (the Big 3 search engines). Without the rankings, you will not have the traffic you need, and you will not be making the profits you want. The worst of it all comes the day a site owner realizes this and starts desperately looking for someone to help them overwrite the code of the template which has been designed so poorly. At this point, regardless of the investment you may have made, it is better to scrap the template site and start from scratch with a real website, custom built for the exact needs of your small business. Your company is very important to you. You intend to run your business in a smart and professional way. In order to do this, why not get it right the first time by hiring a professional web designer who has spent years perfecting their coding, their design skills and their SEO abilities? Remember, you are starting your business because it is what you specialize in. You shouldn't have to become a web designer before you can start selling your products or services. That's taking a completely unnecessary step that all the options out there may have confused you into believing is a good way to go. You don't want to be a web designer. You don't want to spend your days creating web pages for your small business. You want to be taking in sales, filling orders and shipping out your products, or helping customers with your services. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, right? Don't take a detour into the world of useless do-it-yourself programs when it comes to something as vitally important as the success of your on-line business.

Your small web business does have one other option besides either going with a template, or hiring a designer with whom you develop a trusting, long-term business relationship. This is to hire a database programmer who will build you a CMS, a content management system. Basically what this means is that the designer builds you your own custom template with which you will be able to build new pages and manage your inventory from the back end of the site. The positive aspects of this are that you don't have to pay the designer to add new pages and products. However, you will have to become expert at the ever-changing SEO techniques required to get your site ranking well, because that will not be built into the custom template. The negative side of this is that database programmers are very expensive. Why? Because database programming takes a great deal of work! You will need to have a large initial financial budget to secure the services of a good quality database programmer, and because most small businesses don't have this, it is usually not the best option to go with. Apart from this, if you don't have a relationship with the designer you hire and something goes wrong with the template they've built you, you may find yourself on your own. A quality database programmer will not leave you in this awful situation, but a fly-by-night company will. Taking all of the above into consideration, what we recommend as the best route for a small on-line business is to hire an excellent HTML programmer who is also a talented graphic designer, and who can wear the SEO hat, too! The initial cost will be affordable if you've set aside a reasonable budget, and you will be starting with an appealing, professional, custom-made website which has been designed to standard SEO protocols. Yes, you will be paying for periodic updates of your site, but you will also have retained the services of an ally in the often-confusing Internet marketplace. You will know that you can phone up your designer with questions and concerns and they will know exactly who you are and how things are going with your company. A truly top-notch web designer will care about your business almost as much as you do!