It’s said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or that it’s only skin deep. When it comes to your web site, beauty is expensive not just in designing the site, but in what it may do to your traffic. The internet is laden with gorgeous works of art for web sites. They have flashy graphics, subtle cues, beautiful work in cascading style sheets, and more. And they’re losing money. The internet is about commerce, and your web site should be about commerce, not about art.

Design does not motivate a person to buy a product or service. A beautiful site may cause someone to admire how creative your site looks, but turning your visitors into customers requires much more attention to the marketing and advertising process. Proven techniques of converting targeted visitors into customers have little to do with beautiful or creative design.

Avoid excessive clutter, make sure the text is readable (both for color and contrast and for size) and do what you can to make it load fast. Beyond that, focus on what the web site is supposed to do for you, and for your visitor, most especially, for your visitor.

Far better than spending your money on experts on web design (or a web designer trying to build a portfolio site), build a functional, if somewhat basic web site, using cascading style sheets so you can update the look without massive trauma, and focus on what your web site is supposed to do: Convert browsers into buyers.

Now, it’s possible to do this yourself have pay-per-click ads lead to different landing pages, and pick the keywords to find the people who are comparing, buying now, or just browsing (using the same adword phrase with “info”, “buy” and “compare” is one way to do this, albeit a basic one.) However, it’s worth it to hire someone who does this for a living, as there are a lot of tricks out there for conversion, and web design, to make this all combine to raise your profits and sales conversions.

People who hit your web site will be on one of three phases of the customer cycle: They’ll either be looking for information only, looking to do price and deal comparing, or looking to buy right now. Make sure that your advertising leads them to the right place depending on where in that cycle they are.

The other thing to keep in mind is that your time is valuable. It is absolutely worth your time to hire someone to do this for you. Pay Per Click advertising, and landing page building, have a lot of subtleties as much or more so than an eye-grabbing web site does. It’s worth it to find someone who’s trained and certified on the ins and outs of the Search ad products that both Google and Yahoo! give. Google calls these folks Google Certified Professionals, and Yahoo calls them Search Advertising Ambassodors, but they both have the same job: They recommend ad words, look over landing pages, and help you find ways to tune up your ad presence to get the job done, while building a relationship with visitors to your web site.

These experts can help you turn your ad budget from a black hole into something with measurable results, not just on your tracking log, but on your sales log as well. They understand the importance of building relationships with visitors and understand that it’s the relationships that have to be beautiful, not your web site.