With the ever increasing human dependency on The Internet for performing various activities such as banking, shopping or transferring money, there equally exists a need for safe and secure transactions. This need automatically translates to the requirement of increased network security and better and fast encryption algorithms. This paper addresses the above issue by introducing a novel methodology by utilizing the AES method of encryption and also further enhances the same with the help of visual cryptography. The complete algorithm was designed and developed using the MATLAB 2011b software. The paper also discusses a hardware approach for deploying the algorithm and elaborates on an area, speed and power efficient design on a Spartan 3E Xilinx FPGA platform.