4.Usability initiatives like contextual inquiry and usability testing help identify the information customers need to complete the sale ? as well as potential sales obstacles like shipping costs and ease of product returns. Usability research firm User Interface Engineering found that when consumers were given money to shop at well-known sites, 70% of their shopping attempts ended in failure. Because of poor site design, consumers just couldn't find what they were looking for.



In contrast, usability techniques like card sorting help design an intuitive navigation system. This means customers can find the products that they want to buy, increasing sales.

By making it easy for customers to achieve their goals, customers will return and buy from you again. According to Forrester Research, 42% of US Web buying consumers made their most recent online purchase because of a previous good experience with the retailer. A focus on customer goals will also identify the right products to offer for cross-selling, further increasing sales.

By providing a great user experience, customers are more likely to recommend the site to other people - and they are less likely to complain. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, once said: "If you have an unhappy customer on the Internet, he doesn't tell his six friends, he tells his 6,000 friends". (Last month, Bezos's prediction was put to the test when a dissatisfied student launched a Facebook group called "Stop the Great HSBC Graduate Rip-off!". The group quickly grew to over 5,000 members and they succeeded in forcing HSBC to reverse its decision to axe interest-free graduate overdrafts).

People use products and web sites to achieve a goal and then to get on with their life. Few people want to spend their day navigating your web site for buried content. Nowhere is this more relevant than with company intranets.

Focusing on what users want to do, rather than designing a product that does everything for everyone, helps you avoid featuritis. This means you spend time coding only those features that will be used.

5.The NEW Website Optimization Tutorials and Tips section offers helpful tutorials and tips on optimizing your Web site - speed up your Web pages to load faster, save bandwidth, save server space, and more. You'll also find code examples using PHP to automatically speed optimize / crunch your CSS and HTML.

Want to maximize your Web site's performance, speed up your page load times, streamline and optimize your HTML, CSS, images, and scripts? Within the Web Site Optimization section you'll find helpful annotated links to articles, tutorials, scripts, and more on optimizing CSS, HTML and XHTML, Web site images, and JavaScript as well as server-side compression and optimization, too. Your pages can load faster, you'll save bandwidth, reduce file sizes, reduce server space, and much more by optimizing your Web site's performance. You'll also find a listing of recommended books on Web site optimization.

6.If you want visitors to find your Web site, then you'll need to let others know it exists, of course. Some of these ways are through search engine registrations, reciprocal linking, online and offline networking, and traditional forms of advertising, such as through newspapers, radio, TV, and magazine ads.

What if you have a limited budget and limited time? There is much that can be done even without a lot of money or a lot of time.

First of all, search engine registration is definitely important, but it is only one part of helping others find your Web site. When budgeting your Web site construction and ongoing maintenance, I recommend earmarking funds for search engine registrations and follow-up, adding fresh content, and promotion in a variety of ways.

Here are a few things that you can do yourself or for low cost:

Keep content fresh with regular updates, current information.

Add an eye-catching signature tag at the end of your email.

Participate in online discussion lists regularly, also using your signature tag.

Add your URL and email address to all written materials (business cards, letterhead, brochures, literature, publications, products, etc.), and include it in all advertising.

Tell your friends about the Web site. Word of mouth is very powerful.

Send out announcements about your Web site, and send out news and updates.

Start a newsletter that will be of interest to your clients, customers or potential clients or customers.