Website design is a skill that shouldn’t be left to designers, your teenage nephew or anyone else as you must retain control or you may make one of these 10 fatal website design and promotion mistakes.

1.Was sold something pretty but useless - “Choose from 500 templates” is the headline that attracts so many into the website scam. These meaningless websites are easy to set up because they are empty. 4/5 pages is no where near enough to impress your potential visitors. These quick fix websites quickly die and do absolutely nothing for you or your company. The only people that they help are the scam artists that sell you them and then charge you every month to host a dead website.

2. You don’t test your website - When you create content, squeeze pages, autoresponder signups and surveys for your site do you test them out? Are there any dead links or do you test them all? If you don’t test everything then you’re leaving your customers to do it for you. They will be far from impressed.

3. Visitors come and go and never return - If you manage to get some real people visiting your site and you do nothing to capture them then they will come and then they will go and you’ll never know why. Failing to capture them will destroy your sales. Capturing them can mean getting them to leave their email address or capturing their interest so that they return.

4. Dabbling - We all get offers in emails right and while most are ignored we get tempted occasionally. So we buy into the latest scheme and give it a go. Then we get tempted by the next one. The result is that we dabble here and there and get nowhere.

5. Any traffic is good traffic - I got 1000 hits so my website must be great, right? No, wrong dead wrong. Hits don’t matter a stuff. Hits are meaningless as a single visitor can create dozens of hits. Visitors are also meaningless to some extent. What actually matters are prospects - people that may become customers. I’d rather have 1 customer than 1000 hits.

6. Automated spamming advertising - If you really want to spam then you can automate the whole process by buying software solutions that automate the spamming process for you. They don’t tell you that this is what you’ll be doing but it’s the reality of their “instant traffic” program. Don’t do it. It will get you into a heap of trouble.

7. Do you have a fancy graphic logo? - Do you have a flash artistic logo that sits proudly on your site? Do you extend this to graphics for the website buttons? If you rely on graphics then you’re throwing away search engine traffic. Search engines can only see text and not graphics so if you rely on graphics for your logo and your site navigation then you’re throwing away the chance for the search engines to index your business name and your key search keywords that you’ve probably used for your main topic headings. You haven’t done this? Then you better get your site changed.

8. Do you concentrate on style over substance? - Have you been sold on a choice of pretty templates or been mesmerised by graphical tricks that are the latest in website design? If so, then you fallen for the style over substance con. You have a pretty site but it is also pretty useless and does nothing to get visitors it may attract to stay or come back.

9. Don’t update website content - When was the last time that you updated your website with new fresh copy? If the answer is months or years ago then you are presenting a very bad image to your potential customers. It’s like one of those shop or store windows that are dusty and uncared for with goods going stale and cobwebs all over them. That’s not going to attract your customers in to buy is it?

10. Full of errors - Why is it when we send a business letter we check it and retype it but throw up the first draft of web content without even reading it? This strange behaviour is extremely common and leads to websites that are strewn with spelling mistakes and other writing errors that will annoy your customers.

You can still save your website from this commercial suicide if you act now! But be warned if you delay a day longer - your customers will be looking at other websites. If they find more useful content on better sites then they will choose them instead. Wouldn’t you?

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Before you try anything else, make sure you read Tony Hetherington’s excellent free report on avoiding more website disasters and start making money online with website promotion that works