It is important the web design must be unique because there are a lot of templates and themes that can be downloaded from the internet. These templates and themes are mostly designed by professionals but these might have been downloaded by many others too.
The design of your website must be consistent with your company branding if you already have. If you don't have a branding yet, it is a good opportunity that you have website design to establish your branding online and offline.
Fast Loading
The speed of loading the page is very important especially the homepage. There is 3 second rule for the homepage, this means that your homepage should display all elements in 3 seconds, otherwise your website visitor will leave and go to your competitor.
As much as possible you optimise the images, flash files and other elements like Javascript on your homepage unless it is really necessary.
SEO Ready
The menu should have alt tags if it is using images, try to avoid using Javascript in menu, it is best to utilize the capability of CSS and unordered list tags.
Use HTML and CSS to make the search engine bots crawl from left to right and top to bottom. The float left CSS attribute can be utilised on this.
If you are using flat files, use filenames that contain the keyword phrase, but if you are using CMS use URLs search engine friendly and should also contain the targeted keyword phrase.
Keywords Phrase Domain
It is highly recommended to use a targeted keyword phrase domain name. It is not possible, the filenames or the search engine friendly URLs can be used as an option.