Number One Thing To Remember: Strategize before hiring a designer or making any changes. Decide what you want your site to achieve, then keep it clean, simple, easy to load.

You can have ample information on a web site without bogging down the users. Put all the information that is useful to your various types of customers. It's up to the information designer or web designer to be able to put that content on the site in a way that is not overwhelming to your visitors.

Some things to keep in mind:
1. You have about 5 seconds from the moment someone reaches your site to make your point. If they don't get it, their gone. Be extremely clear about what your business is about and who it's for.
2. Your site should talk less about you and what you do and more about your target customer and what they need.
3. Depending on your business, give strong consideration to using a blog. It adds content and value to your site and gives people a reason to follow you.
4. Be transparent about who's behind the business. If you have an "about us" page, use pictures and bios of yourself and anyone else in the business- people do busines with people- not with logos.
5. Be clear about how people can engage or buy your service.
6. Put at least 200 words on each page of your site for searchability but don't make the site heavy with text. State your points very succinctly. Make it an easy read.
7. Put a "contact us" space on every page of the site
8. Add connections to all your social media addresses. Twitter, Linked In etc.
9. Be genuine and relevant.
10. Be interesting. Don't be boring. There's enough of that out there already.

Good luck!

I would say it's a combination of 2 things:

1. What you want to say

2. What people want to learn more about (i.e., find more information about)

:) nmw

Source: http://traffic.de.com