The ten most alienating mistakes you can make on your web site.

Are you driving users away—and losing business—because of any of these ten, easily fixable goofs?

The "global handshake" is now a global business cliche.

1. Cliches

Use language and images with originality, precision and skill. If you write in cliches, I know you’re either (1) talking down to me, and/or (b) not offering me anything unique or original. And please, don’t give me boring visual cliches either. I’m not apt to buy, sign up for anything, or even stick around to check out your site.

2. Jargon

Plain talk works best. “I offer my web 2.0 clients techniques for listening to users, establishing full transparency, and  SMO.” If you don’t know what this means, are you going to buy from, listen to, or recommend me? Or even stay on my site? Doubt it. (Jargon decoder here.)

3. Squinting and peering

Can I read it? Avoid text/background contrast that is too low (or too high), and text that is very tiny or in a strange, decorative but unreadable font. If I have to squint, peer, or put on/take off glasses to read your site, I’m probably going to forget it.

4. Nobody home

I want to know there’s a real person or people standing behind your site. If there is no name, no bio, no picture, no address, no phone number, nothing but an email contact form, I’m not going to contact you. Period.

5. Circularity

Give me a simple, logical structure. Can I find, and get back to, information I want on your site without  having to think about it, and without feeling like I’m going in circles? If I can’t find things… or can’t get away from them…. buh-bye!

6. Flash

Steve Jobs isn’t the only one who hates Flash. If you must have a Flash intro, make the “skip intro” link big, front, and center. Otherwise I might not see it before I leave—because I probably won’t wait around for the Flash to load. And if I have to download a plugin just to see your site? Fuggedaboudit.

7. Expired third-party services and content

Check your site regularly. Do you use a third-party service like Wufoo for your contact form? Third-party search? Any kind of third-party-provided content… news crawls, RSS feeds, affiliate banners? If your contact form is non-functional because a service like Wufoo changed its link structure… or because you forgot to pay your bill… it shouldn’t be on your site.

8. Not enough information

Give me information I can sink my teeth into. Yes, hyper-designed, text-minimal sites can be gorgeous. But in order to sign up for your mailing list, I have to be interested, not just dazzled. And to buy something, I have to trust you. Where’s the beef?

9. PDFs

Use html for “perishable” information. I’ll gladly download a PDF if it’s a report, a list, an article, an itinerary … something that I’ll want to print, read later or in installments, study, or carry along. But I really hate having to wait for a download that I know I’m going to have to trash the moment I’ve glanced at it. Put non-download info into browsable html, please, or I won’t bother.

10. Repetition.

Let me choose whether to read repetitive copy. Do I need to read the same intro text word for word on every page, or every similar item you sell? Yes? Then put it on its own page, linked with a “more info” link so I don’t have to skim it over every single time I click on an item. Or use a “hide content” widget like WordPress’ Collapsible Elements plugin (currently due to be discontinued in August 2010) so that I can read it if I want, or skip it easily.

User-friendliness means better business

It’s all too easy to get lazy or rushed and miss something super-obvious on your site. We’ve all done it. But it’s a lot better for your business to give people an interesting, well-conceived, efficient site that lets visitors know that you have their needs in mind.

The Heart of Business blog had a great post by Judy Murdoch recently called “How Is a Mailing List Like a Pizza Delivery Truck?”

Judy said that a list is like a pizza truck because they’re both marketing assets. This made me think about web sites. And I realized that for me, a web site is like a house. They’re both highly integrated systems for making your life easier and more comfortable.

We don’t usually think of homes as systems, until we have to fix, renovate, or build one. Then suddenly the “systems” aspect is clear. Not just in what needs to be done first—electrical, then drywall, then floors—but in how it all works together once it’s finished.

A house has systems: water coming in, waste going out, fresh air and light coming in, heat pumping in, a mailbox. Pretty basic? Yes, but let’s say you don’t have all these things, or don’t have some of them.

For example. No plumbing, just an outhouse. I’ve lived in pretty primitive conditions and an outhouse can work just fine. In fact you can be darned happy to have one. But would it be an inconvenience to have to dig and use an outhouse in my little urban backyard? Absolutely.

Running water. When I lived in a small village in Mexico, most people didn’t have running water inside, just outside. And it wasn’t hot, it was only cold. This was a warm climate, and taking everything—dishes, clothes, babies, selves—outside to wash didn’t seem like a big deal to anyone. But if I had to do it here? I’d freeze. And when would I be working on my business?

Or a washing machine. For many years I took my clothes to the laundromat. And compared to having to wash by hand on an outdoor washboard, a laundromat is pretty efficient. But going to the laundromat was an imposition, an interruption, and a hassle which, between packing, loading, driving, washing, drying, folding, and schlepping back home, took several hours every couple of weeks. I am SO glad not to have to do that anymore.

So. For me to live reasonably well and work at maximum efficiency, I need certain things. Indoor plumbing, hot water, heating, ventilation, a washer-dryer, waste pickup.

A house is a system of integrated components that makes life easier. Our web-based businesses are the same. Judy uses the example of a mailing list, and how, when she started, she sent out all her emails by hand. So did I. And I know people who are still doing it that way, even though their list numbers in the hundreds.

It’s like having to take all the dishes outside to wash. Very time-consuming, and unnecessary. With list management software, sending a mass email is the work of ten minutes, not several hours.

Your web site supports your business. For many of us, it’s about as physical as our business gets. It’s where our business “lives.” And it needs systems too. It has an outside, that people strolling by can see, and an inside, where you do your living and working.

From the “outside,” or visitor’s point of view, your site needs to

• be findable
• respond to a need or problem
• be cohesive, coherent, make sense
• communicate clearly
• offer actions visitors can take to engage with you & your business (and increasingly, to interact with each other via sharing on other social networks)
• everything has to work smoothly and transparently

From the “inside,” from your vantage point as the business owner and manager, your site needs to:

• attract traffic
• have a way of creating a pool of people with whom you can connect at will via email or other means
• give you a way of sending out email or some other kind of periodic update and announcement to them
• have a stats package that you can use to test and monitor changes to your site, as well as number of visitors and their search habits
• often, it needs to enable you to collect money—better yet, in a way that links with your bookkeeping systems
• often, to deliver digital goods
• be quickly updatable
• be able to grow with you and your business, not lock you into a technological box
• be cost-effective to maintain

As with a house, you can do without certain things, if you’re willing to live with the inconvenience. No mailing list manager? OK, so you spend several hours entering email addresses into your list, then sending your emails out by hand. Is that an efficient choice for you now?

No stats package? Or one that just shows number of visitors? Fine. But that means you don’t know how people are searching for your site, where they’re finding you, where they enter, where they leave, how long they stay, which pages they spend most time on, how many buy or sign up versus how many visit. Any alterations you make to your site will be based on guesswork, and you’ll have no way to test their effectiveness. Does that make sense for you now?

And just like building a house, when you’re building a site it’s far less expensive to put things in at the right time. Are you going to sell merchandise? Then great, let’s set up for that now instead of having to spend more money to rebuild the site to accommodate a shopping cart down the road. Write a blog? Great, let’s build that into the site design, rather than tack it on later.

The point: to live and work at the level modern life requires, you need a house with all its systems working. Same with a web site. All the site’s systems—email gathering, social networking, selling, download-handling, order processing, bookkeeping, traffic monitoring—need to work together as efficiently as possible, or it will be very difficult to work at the level you need to to make a living from your business.

Do you want an up-to-date web site with the latest super-cool techie bell or whistle? Don’t we all?  And WordPress: it’s so contemporary, versatile and inexpensive. So, pick a theme already, and get to it! (A WordPress “theme” is the design template that determines layout, type, color, etc. for your content.)

But wait a sec. I’ve found that there are huge differences among themes, differences that are invisible until you start working with them. Choosing a sloppily constructed one, or one that isn’t updated, can be an expensive mistake. Here’s how to pick the right one.

Premium (Paid), or Free Theme?

There are thousands of free WordPress themes. For a long time, all themes were free. And some of the free ones have problems. Issues I’ve encountered include:

• Themes that “broke” when I upgraded WordPress
• Coding so sloppy that basic customization was a humongous job
• Standard features that didn’t work

This being said, if you have simply a plain-vanilla blog, or simple blog plus a few static pages, and you don’t need a custom look, many free themes will work just fine. A good place to start looking for good free themes is the WordPress site:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

But if you’re planning a more complex site—for example, you need a content management system (CMS), a magazine- or newspaper-style front page featuring many items, an e-store, a digital portfolio, a real estate site, or a photoblog, selecting a theme is much tougher. You need a specialty theme which has the appropriate features already built into it from the start. For these more specialized and complex sites, as well as for any site that will require extensive customization, I would tend to look at a premium theme first.

Premium Themes

It took me a long time to warm up to the idea of paid premium themes. Now I’m a convert. Most premium themes are cleanly coded, work well, and are regularly updated. Prices generally run from $20 to $80 or so for single-site use. Some wonderful themes I’ve worked with come from:

Ithemes: specialized premium themes including magazine, real estate, ecommerce and online gallery/portfolio (I have used several of these themes and am an iThemes affiliate)

Themeforest: many well-designed specialty themes, updated at the discretion of their authors.

Woothemes: many magazine- and news-style themes, with support. (I have worked with several of these am an affiliate.)

The Market Theme: one of the top paid premium theme specially designed for ecommerce (I am an affiliate). (For more on ecommerce and WordPress, see my article “Ecommerce: How to Choose the Best Shopping Cart for Your Site.”)

Theme Frameworks

Recently, “theme frameworks” have come on the scene. These are basic themes which offer the ability to customize the design using more mouseclicks than actual code. (Here’s a somewhat technical intro with a discussion of the pros and cons of each major framework:  including some that are not mentioned here.) So, they’re highly adaptable to your particular purpose, and suffer few update problems. Three of the most popular theme frameworks are

Carrington (free)
Thematic (free)
Thesis (paid premium)
ThemeHybrid (free)

Thesis, for example, allows you to have either a magazine-style home page, a conventional blog page with either 2 or 3 columns, or a simple static home page, with a few mouse clicks and no programming at all.

End Theme Overwhelm!

There are thousands of gorgeous themes out there, and it’s easy to fall into overwhelm unless you have a plan. Here’s how.

• First, know what features you need in your theme and cannot compromise on.
• Then, troll for templates that already have all or most of those features, designed by reputable sources with a good track record in providing working themes.

You’ll end up with a handful—or maybe just one or two—themes which offer the features you’re looking for. At this point, cost might be a deciding factor. Or you may want to experiment among the themes on your short list to find the one that works best for you. Don’t sweat the final decision. If you’ve done your homework, any of the themes on your list will make you happy and serve you well for a long time.

Have you ever chosen a theme that broke? That you love? I’d love to hear your experiences.

Does your site feel boring, outdated, and passé… because you’re sick of its colors? Do you want to revamp it, but don’t know how to go about choosing new ones, or even whether to try?

It’s worth the effort. Your web site has ten seconds to make an impression. Color is a plays a critical role in that decisive moment. And color is not only how people get drawn into your site, it’s how they recognize and remember it to come back.

Color Provides the Visual Cues that Are Key to Having a Memorable Site

Do you need a designer’s help to get started picking a great color palette? No! Here’s a simple worksheet for choosing a complete color palette for your site.

1. What feeling(s) do you want your business to convey? Express this in a minimum of three, and a maximum of six, words.

2. Does your business currently use distinctive colors—in its logo, business card, storefront, etc.—that “must” be used in your web site? Add it, or them, to your potential palette now.

3. Think about warm colors (yellow-orange-red-brown) as opposed to cool colors (green -blue-indigo-violet-gray). For example, blue is a frequently used in business because it creates a sense of calm, trustworthiness, solidity and confidence. However, it is “cool” rather than warm. If one of your chosen adjectives was “warmth,” or if you have a “people” business, blue might be better used as an accent rather than a major component of your site.

Red, the quintessential “warm” color, conveys vitality, health and playfulness. But it also can imply a sense of urgency and alarm. Many colors are ambiguous in this way, with meanings and associations which vary from culture to culture. Keep in mind any strong color associations of your potential audience(s). An excellent short article by Rob Mills on how color communicates meaning is here.

4. Right now, choose a “draft” palette of 5 or 6 colors (a palette is a collection of 3 to eight colors that work well together). You can use swatches from the local paint store, colored pens, a scanned image which contains the colors you want, Photoshop—whatever you feel comfortable with. There are some very helpful online tools as well. I like Adobe’s Kuler, and Color Scheme Designer, both free. (And yes, this should be fun!)

5. Consider contrast. Bright, strong, and dark colors work well for headlines. Very light colors make lousy headlines, but can make wonderful backgrounds. You can lighten or darken some colors on your palette for the sake of contrast. Getting stuck? Browse sites you admire, and observe how they have used warm and cool, light and dark, bright and dull.

6. Check for readability. Is your color vision normal? Approximately 15% of the general population have some kind of distortion in the way they perceive color. There’s a good visual simulator of various kinds of color blindness here. Your site needs to be legible for these folks. Modify accordingly!

7. Will people be printing out your web pages? If so, use dark type on a light or white background for the printable versions.

8. Now, let’s get down to business. It’s time to finalize at least two strong colors which can predominate on the site. Designate another one or two that can be used as accent or background colors. It’s better to have too few than too many colors—designer Roger Black, for example, gained international fame for his distinctive magazine designs using just black, white, and red, period.

Once you’ve done the right-brain choosing, and the left-brain tweaking, you’ll have a color palette that you can use on any site or template. Still aren’t satisfied? Try one of the online palette-creation sites mentioned above. Or, look at photos (travel photos are especially good), paintings, or design books for more ideas. The book Living Colors: The Definitive Guide to Color Palettes Through the Ages, is a particularly good source—authors Hope and Walch have extracted gorgeous color palettes from the art and décor of many ages and places, which can all be adapted for the web.

But above all, have fun. Color appeals to a primal part of us, and its meaning and impact can’t be fully explained. So savor the inexplicable. If you’re enjoying it, chances are your site visitors will too.

Have you experimented with color palettes, or found a really helpful color-picking tool? I’d love to hear from you.

If you’re a sole proprietor just starting a new venture, you may not want to pay a designer for a custom web site—especially when you can test your market, concept, and business model with little or no investment of time and money. Here are some web site options that can get your site up and running fast, with no stress about time or cost.

Some require that you already have a domain name ($10) and a web hosting account ($4 to $5 per month); some are self-hosted and totally free.

Free Downloadable Web Site Templates

Do a quick search on any major search engine and you’ll find thousands of free site templates, many of them quite good looking and well constructed. Caveats? Read the terms of service—some require a link back to the site or template author. You’ll need some basic html knowledge in order to input your content and upload the finished files to your web host.

Use Your Web Host’s Free Site Templates

Many web hosts, including Godaddy.com and Yahoo, offer free web templates. You purchase a low-cost hosting plan, then pick a pre-designed template that most closely matches your business. Customize it using built-in or downloadable tools, and voila, there’s your web site. You don’t need to know anything about coding or html. True, you don’t have total and absolute control over the appearance of your site. But it’s quick, and it’s cheap.

Free Google Sites & Blogs

Google offers a totally free online site-building tool and hosting service. You don’t need any expertise whatsoever, you don’t need to pay one dime, and you can use these sites for business and commercial purposes. You can have your own site up in half an hour, no technical knowledge required. Check them out at sites.google.com. Remember to read the terms of service, privacy, and policies pages.

Planning a blog? Google also offers a free blogging service, blogger.com. Your own very attractively customized blog can be online in five minutes.

More Totally Free Site Services

Check out the free services out there, like GoGoPin, or blogging guru Seth Godin’s Squidoo (single-page sites called “lenses,” that gather information on a particular topic, product, project, or business), or the free start-your-own-social-network site, Ning. (Again, always read the terms of service and privacy policies. Be aware that a free, hosted site service offered by a brand-new company may or may not be a long-lived endeavor.)

WordPress for Web Sites, Blogs, Ecommerce and Membership Sites

WordPress was originally developed as a free, open-source blogging platform. It has evolved into a powerful site tool that’s used by major newspapers, universities and businesses—and it’s still free.

WordPress is not the simplest option out there, but it is the most scalable. Starting with a simple one-click template, you can later evolve your site into an extremely sophisticated and powerful system. WordPress allows you to start small and end up big, without ever having to change platforms or portage your content from one interface to another.

WordPress.org offers free downloads to install on your own domain. Many web hosts (including my favorite, Westhost) also offer free, one-click installation.

WordPress.com offers free, hosted blog sites on their domain.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect

The web is not a permanent medium. It encourages flexibility and experimentation. Yes, you can get started now, on a shoestring! A very short shoestring. Or even no string at all. Your site isn’t perfect? That really doesn’t matter, because it will continue to change as you learn and grow. Sometimes it just makes sense to begin simply, even when you’re aiming high.

Do you have your own free site source, comment, or experience to share? Please join the discussion.