Think of your website as your storefront open 24X7 accessible to the whole world.  Imagine how you would design a physical store if you were to do that.  You would really dedicate resources, think creatively, and do your very best.  This is exactly the process that you need while designing your website.  Whether you are designing your website yourself or using an outside design firm, you will need a wholesome approach to designing your website. You will need to work closely with your webmaster (if designing yourself) or with the outside firm (if outsourced) to develop a winning Internet marketing strategy and design that will result in an appealing site that will attract customers and effectively communicate your message to potential customers.

Concept

This is the first step in web design and it involves turning your ideas and goals into a powerful concept that appeals to your visitors.  Your designers should work with you to understand your business and you must help them to define the architecture and appearance of your site.  Get engaged.  Don't just give it to them and expect them to come up with the final answer.  Spend the time to brainstorm and develop the concept yourself.  Otherwise, they will use a template based design or tweak another design that they have developed.  That is not what you want.  Only you know your business best and if you don't communicate that to the designers, they will not be able to do their best.

Action plan

Taking the concept and translating it into an attractive design is the next step.  You must at this point develop an action so that the designers will work with your team interactively as design work is going along so that you can suggest any changes.  You must also insist on looking at the design regularly so that you can make changes before a lot of the work is completed.  Designing websites should be a team effort .

Result

If you follow the process above, chances are that you will be satisfied with the final results.  If not, change it till you feel that it is right.  It will be cheaper to fix it now than at a later stage.

Another point to remember is that web design is a very dynamic process.  Designing your website and just leaving it there is not going to do you much good.  Websites that are not regularly updated do not get indexed by search engines and are difficult to find.  So make sure that you set a system in place for regular updates, for example, product announcements, promotions, or any other changes that you would like your customers to know.