COSITO provides website design.

COSITO Knowledge Base

Whether it's on the battlefield or the football field, you have to be identifiable as friend or foe.
Instantly. Positively.
It's the same in the world of commerce. Successful product placements and corporations have strong visual identities that make them distinctively different from all others externally -- and homogenous within.
Well-designed magazines and newspapers also have 'house styles' that set them apart from the competition and gives each page a visual relationship to others within the same publication. It may be the typography, the use of a color scheme, a constantly applied graphic device or any combination of these but the effect is the same - to hold the whole thing together and separate it from everything else.
A web site needs a strong identity even more.
The unifying effect imposed by the restrictions of HTML layout and the general lack of consideration given to the 'look' of pages because they were constructed by people trained in the technical aspects of web page creation, but not necessarily in the aesthetics or psychology.
Look at it this way, if you want to hide a soldier, make him blend in with the terrain. Animals have been using camouflage as a means of survival since the beginning of time, so if you want to hide your web page, make it look the same as everyone else's. You won't have to try very hard, it will just happen by itself.
The other easy thing to do, to make your web page look like a 'web page', is to follow convention.
Banner along the top, menu down the left hand side. It works. Everybody does it. Have a look at any of the popular news sites, they are now starting to look the same because someone has come up with a formula and it is being adopted, adapted and regurgitated again and again.
In any design task - a building, a car, a web page - there are two considerations. The first is the practical one. Does it work? Cars tend to look similar because they have a wheel at each corner, seats in the middle and a roof on top. Although there are minor variations from time to time, the look of a car is dictated by its functionality.
Then there is the stylistic aspect. How can one car that is functionally and mechanically identical to another be so much more desirable? The fact is that it is not just a machine, it is an extension of the owner's personality and creates an emotive response in anybody who looks at it.
You can't separate these two factors, if you get either the mechanics or the style wrong, you have a flop on your hands. With a web page, you have the 'mechanics' of getting the HTML right to provide the 'function' of getting the message across. The 'style' provides a more subliminal communication, but it's just as important because it can reinforce, or contradict what you are saying. It is the 'tone-of-voice' of the message.
A strong visual identity is, by definition, a bold statement but the trouble with making such a positive statement is that it has to be the right one. Its strength can also be its weakness because it will tend to polarize opinion. People will either love it or hate it! Strong personalities don't give birth to indifference.
But don't confuse a strong statement with a loud statement, there is a world of difference. It's the tone-of-voice thing again. It is better to communicate clearly, with quiet confidence than to yell your head off about something that is probably not worth saying in the first place. A flashing animated GIF may attract attention, but then so does a hornet!
In creating a powerful identity for your web site, it will become both noticed and remembered. It should be distinctively different from other sites and that means coming up with a unique visual vocabulary, a style that is both appropriate and sympathetic to the message. A marble background is great, if you have a site about stone-masonry or bathroom fittings. If you are using it because you think it looks nice, think again, it's a cliche. Web page cliches are the leopard's spots, the battletank's irregular markings. They contrive to make you site blend-in rather than stand-out.
It is very unlikely that your site will have universal appeal. As soon as you have a definite subject, you are targeting a particular audience and dismissing all the rest. The web is not like a newspaper or television channel, it is much more like a magazine stall with a plethora of diverse interests. This makes it easier to narrow down your design options by a simple process of elimination.

You probably have competition. Somewhere on the web, there will be one or more sites with similar subject matter to yours attracting the same audience. Look at them and see what you should NOT do.
Packaging designers have to design packs that stand out from the competition on crowded supermarket shelves. They will try to recreate that situation in the studio by buying all the competitive products and lining them up with their prototype designs. Every pack is vying for visual dominance by being bigger, brighter or tastier than the ones around it. You can try to out-dominate all the others or, be clever, and change the rules completely. Don't put your shampoo in a plastic bottle, put it in a can! All of a sudden, you have created a unique product that stands out from the crowd because you have dared to be different.
Having created that kind of difference for your web site, stand back and watch. It won't be long before the 'me-toos' spring up. You will soon be back in a camouflage situation but then, you will know what to do about it!

Creating the right visual relationship between a web-based brand message and its other, more traditional, media manifestations is the first task for the designer but there is more to branding a web page than merely slapping a logo on it.
As these activities migrate to the comparatively new medium of the web, it is useful to explore how techniques can be leveraged from the more traditional media and how they can be adapted and improved to best advantage in the new environment.
A company or product logo is the "face" by which it is recognized. A "brand" goes deeper than that. It is a persona that is accumulated over time from various "brand values" that have been projected though advertising, promotion and personal experiences. A "branded" web page has to be sympathetic to the brand as a whole, not only visually but in tone-of-voice, attitude and personality.
Transferring a brand identity from a printed page to a web page is not particularly difficult. The key word is "consistency". If you tell the same story over and over again, or show the same picture, the brand identity becomes stronger and more memorable - all part of the cumulative effect.Conversely, any deviation or inconsistency confuses and weakens the image and should be avoided. 
Adapting Design Skills to Web Branding
The classic supermarket techniques of "standout", "shelf impact", "quality and value-for-money perceptions" all have their equivalents in the world-wide web environment. Graphic designers have various visual tricks to make a product stand out from the crowd, mainly by making them look distinctively different from the rest and by using powerful visual imagery. Like concentrated washing powder or tomato paste, a little goes a long way and has to be used with taste and discretion.
Look at what your competitors are doing.
Do something else!
Adapting a brand image to work across a multi-page site means that you have to treat the whole site as a homogenous entity. Each page must relate to the others through consistent application of logos, colors, backgrounds, layouts or other visual anchors - and even writing style. The fact that you have to work within the web's bandwidth constraints actually helps here. The reuse of cached pictorial elements not only makes for more efficient loading times, it helps to hold a site together visually.

The Web's Place in an Overall Brand Strategy
In budgetary terms, putting a brand message on the web is comparatively low risk. Sure, there are some design and production costs, there always are, but you can have a hard working site on the web for a year for the same kinds of figures you would spend in a day in the press or in seconds on television. Obviously, some products are more suited to web promotion than others; the web has its own socio-demographical profile in terms of age, education and interests.
Whatever else, the target audience are computer users? Tens of millions of them. But even better, they take their computers seriously. That?s a big market - and a lot of opportunities!
If your company makes Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce, the web is probably the place to do your corporate advertising, not your brand advertising. Your target audience might well be potential consumers but not necessarily the main purchaser. So, your web presence may be selling the concept of financial investment in your company, or offer employment opportunities. You might also consider using a web page to explain the dietary benefits of eating beans and telling readers about how many millions of satisfied customers you have on a daily basis. The trick here is to educate and inform in a "soft sell" manner that reinforces the overall brand image.

Go along with what the web is good at!
Use it, don't fight it.
There is a subtle, but important, difference between "information" and a "sales message". Just remember, it is always easier to "sell" when the defenses are down.

The Real Advantages of Web Marketing
The web has a high degree of immediacy. It is also interactive. In fact, no other medium comes anywhere near it in these terms. Herein lays the real benefits of brand projection and marketing on the web.
By marketing a product on the web, it is possible to closely target appropriate groups and even individuals. From the client's perspective, his brand is being promoted very effectively and efficiently.
The message about the product is getting through to the right people and not wasting money with scatter-gun techniques.
Now, it makes little difference whether the product is being promoted locally, nationally or internationally, the web opens up markets that would be impractical or prohibitively expensive to address using conventional means.
The web is both increasing the size of your market, and improving the likelihood of hitting the right consumer profile.
Using dynamically generated web page content, specific sales messages or promotions can be delivered accurately, on a personal basis, in almost any language. The inherently flexible nature of a web page layout can accommodate varying graphical and textural content much more easily than its printed counterpart can, it just stretches to fit, and can be updated every few seconds if necessary.
By fulfilling the customer's needs and buying experience in this positive way, perceptions of the company and product will be enhanced. That's what brand building is all about!
However, marketing goes beyond just selling, and the web can help here too. A large proportion of any brand launch effort goes into consumer research. It is a kind of feedback loop which starts with conceptual and creative ideas being tested on potential customers. Their reactions are then fed back into the mix and after a number of iterations; the company has a brand concept that has a greater chance of success in the marketplace. Moving some of these activities to the web can short circuit the process to a large degree.
Information - feedback. Information - feedback.
Not only do timescales and costs telescope to a fraction of their traditional counterpart, the whole process can be automated using server scripts to do the screening, filtering and analysis. The interactivity means that you can get immediate response at relatively low cost.

Back to the Future
With web-based marketing, we have gone full circle and returned to something closer to the bazaar marketing model. Once more, we have the personal, one-to-one transaction with the buyer and the seller "virtually" face to face.
Through the provision of information, product benefits, links to comparative (unbiased) reviews, price comparisons and the exchange of money for goods, we are escaping from the old, two-tier process of  separating "selling" from "the transaction". Previously, much of the effort and money spent on branding is just in making and maintaining the connection between the two processes. Web marketing can give more focus to the brand itself and more immediate results on the bottom line. Instead of running to keep up, you can be sprinting ahead.