Although extensive efforts have been devoted to the optimal design of composite laminated plates in recent years, some practical issues still need further research. Two of them are: the handling of the ply angle as either continuous or discrete; and that of the uncertainties in material properties, which were treated as continuous and ignored respectively in most researches in the past. In this paper, an algorithm for stacking sequence optimization which deals with discrete ply angles and that for thickness optimization which considers uncertainties in material properties are used for a two step optimization of composite laminated plates. In the stacking sequence optimization, the branch and bound method is modified to handle discrete variables; and in the thickness optimization, the convex modeling is used in calculating the failure criterion, given as constraint, to consider the uncertain material properties. Numerical results show that the optimal stacking sequence is found with fewer evaluations of objective function than expected with the size of feasible region taken into consideration; and the optimal thickness increases when the uncertainties of elastic moduli considered, which shows such uncertainties should not be ignored for safe and reliable designs.