Top 10 Website Mistakes: Are YOU Making Them?

Although personal and business websites have been in existence for more than 10 years, I'm still seeing small business owners make the same mistakes on their websites. Here's a list of the ones that will drive people away from your site and cause you to lose business (and your reputation as a professional business person). 1. "Under construction" signs on your site. Websites are intended to be Living Documents. They are supposed to change and grow. Putting an "under construction" sign on your website marks you as an amateur. If your site isn't ready to show to the public, don't publish it to a public location. 2. Visitor counters. Visitors generally don't care how many other people have visited your site. If the visitor counter shows a low number, that can be a psychological turn-off to people; if it's too high, people might believe that you've forged the number. Take the visitor counter off your site and use your website statistics to get a more accurate assessment of the people visiting your site. If your hosting company doesn't provide good statistics, get a new one. Check out our article on how to choose a hosting company: 4. Overuse of technology. There are some really great, cool and wild techie things you can program into your website. But if they are going to distract the visitor from your message, or if they're going to slow down the loading of your page, ditch the extra technology in favor of simplicity. This includes large Flash shows when your site opens, animated graphics and other large graphics, as well as scrolling text and audio that comes on as soon as the person hits your website. Recent surveys show that people crave simplicity and easy navigation in sites. 5. Passive verbs. Use active verbs and active sentences when writing your site's copy. Active verbs are powerful and lend energy to your site. Need to brush up on using active verbs? Check out this site: It might have worked in the movie Field Of Dreams, but the reality of internet marketing is: build it, MARKET it, and they will come. Once you've built your website you have to tell people about it. Think of your website the same way you'd think of a box of marketing brochures: if you don't get them into the hands of people, they're not worth the money you spent to create them. 2005 Karyn Greenstreet.

Karyn Greenstreet is a self-employment expert and small business coach. She shares tips, techniques and strategies with self-employed people to maintain motivation, stay focused, prioritize tasks, and increase revenue and profits. Visit her website at