If you want a website for your business, you most likely want a website that will bring you more customers. Getting customers is a marketing task and all marketing is situational.
For example, if you have a burger stand in a desert and crowds of hungry people around, you don’t really need to do any marketing. You will have customers even if you don’t do any marketing simply because people are hungry and you are the only source of food available. Your food doesn’t even have to be that good. It works in the same way with websites. If you are the only provider of a service or product in a niche or geographic locality, you do not need to spend a lot of money on world-class web design. A simple website will do.
It is a different story if you are a restaurant in East Village or Theater District in New York City and are surrounded by hundreds of competitors. You will need to find creative ways to stand out. Your website will need to stand out, too. You will need to put a lot of thought into your goals, positioning, advantages, branding and marketing message.
All of the above means that there’s no such thing as a perfect website. At the same time, there are certain elements that all websites need to have.
For example, a website needs to have something that serves as a confirmation that a visitor has arrived in the right place. Finding a website, getting to the website and browsing the website are all parts of the same process. These parts need to work flawlessly together. If you are promising quick weight loss solutions and then your visitor learns that he or she will need to exercise two hours a day every day for three years, the visitor would leave the website in a heartbeat and the design of the website will simply not matter.