Design and usability matters a lot when creating a company website and getting it right could be the difference between business success and business failure. Chris Barling, chief executive of ecommerce software provider Actinic, offers best practice advice.
Getting design right is both hard and controversial. If you ask a cross section of the population their opinion of a particular design, there are usually as many opinions as the number of people. To try to understand design in a business context, I think that it's worth asking what the difference is between design and art? I would define design as the constrained application of art. Good designers are interested in the practical application of their creative output. And design is not just about aesthetics, it also embraces usability, cost and other more prosaic factors.
Designing a website that can sell successfully has many of the elements of ordinary sales and marketing, combined with creativity.
Design basics
The aim of design has to be to support the objectives of the site. In the case of ecommerce sites this is primarily to sell.
Join our social media discussion group and share your Twitter username with other BusinessZone members. 
We're putting together a list of business owners' must-haves. 
Dragons' Den judges James Caan and Deborah Meaden and social entrepreneur Karen Darby are some of the successful entrepreneurs who feature in our exclusive videos.