These days, the appeal of your website is based primarily on its visual aesthetic. Even if you're only selling aquarium test kits to pet store wholesalers, you just can't get away with a text-based page anymore. It makes you seem unprofessional. Images, therefore, are the cornerstone of any good website. This is bad news for anyone who was hoping to design the page themselves but is no good with Photoshop and good news for all the graphic artists out there who are looking for work.

The best way to get a great looking website is to hire a graphic artist. Period. You can try to create something yourself, but unless you have highly developed skills your MC Escher art will look pixilated and improperly proportioned and the whole site will end up looking amateurish. Bad art is worse than no art, so if you want to add images you need to make sure they can measure up to the unwritten standards of the internet that users have come to expect.

What are these standards? Well, your site should be colorful without being gaudy, contain images without being cluttered with them, blend the images into menus content without using harshly defined borders, display properly on any screen size at any resolution, and not take an eternity to load. This is a tall order for a dentist in Toronto doing his first web project but business as usual for a professional graphic designer.

Many people are afraid they'll lose control over the look of their horse fencing supplies website if they let a designer onto the project, but that's not the case. Graphic designers are hired guns. They work for you, not the other way around. If you're not pleased with their designs, you're within your rights to give them your feedback and send them back to the drawing board. Ideally the two of you will work together to achieve the right look for the project.

When you're ready to hire a graphic designer, often the best place to look is on the internet. Graphic designers promote their work by creating sample websites featuring content they designed so you can view their portfolios without even having to contact them. If you have a friend who hired a designer to create a page of his custom doll houses, you might ask that friend whether he or she would recommend that designer to you.