Berkshire Hathaway made a record $6 billion last quarter. Have you seen their website? If not, you can see it here. Berkshire Hathaways's website is a terrific example of how you don't need a great looking website to be successful. Yes, there are some industries where it would help to have a great looking website (specifically web designers). But as a business owner the most important thing to you is your bottom line and having a great looking website isn't always what's best for the bottom line.

To better understand this let's take a look at some of the magical things a website can do for a business. It can find you new leads and customers, answer questions about your products or services, work like a phone book giving people easy access to see what you do and find out how to contact you.

What's important to most people is not how pretty your website is. It's how easily they can find the information they're looking for on your site. So what's some of the information a person is likely to look for when visiting a website? I'd say the number one thing everyone is looking for is a way to contact you. So why not put your phone number at the top of every page? From my experience most people don't like to read, but they love to talk. Why not let them pick up the phone and talk to you about it is you're selling?

Let's fact it, if you load up your website a lot of pretty pictures or special effect it will most definitely look cool to you. But it's also likely to make for a slow loading webpage. And if that page loads slow enough, the person will leave your website and never come back. It's far more practical to fill your page with highly relevant information that answers the questions... What do you? Where are you located? How does it work?

Don't let looks stop you from achieving your goals. It's more important you provide the information people are looking for on your site, and making it easy for them to find, then it is about having a really catchy looking site.

Here are a few tips you can use to make sure you're creating a website that conveys the information your visitors want.

1. Ask yourself the goal of your website

If the primary goal of your website is to sell a product, make the website all about getting them to click that buy now button and complete checkout. If your want them to call you, make it about the phone number. If you want to capture their email address make it all about the opt-in form.

2. Have a concise headline.

There's a lot of site on the internet. If someone can't figure out what your website is about in five seconds their gone. Put a big newspaper style headline across the top of your homepage to assure people they came to the right place. Make sure your headline clearly reflects what the site is about.

3. Don't fill your page with numerous images.

The more images you add to a page or the larger the image file sizes are the longer it takes for your page to load. If your page doesn't load in a few seconds your site visitors are going to be out of there. Keep the number of images and the size of the files minimal to ensure quick loading times.

4. Have a call to action.

If you've done all the above mentioned things right your site visitor is going to want to know what to do next. Don't make this a mystery for  them - tell 'em. You can do this by making a big button that says something like "click here to continue" or a phone number with the words call us. It's that simple.

If you've got these basic things on your website, don't sweat the look. Yes, it's fun to make things look interesting - just make sure you take care of business first.