Do you want a successful website? First, ask yourself, what is the purpose of your electronic presence? Is it marketing, information dissemination, or e-commerce? If it's a little bit of each, which is the main focus? If all you want is marketing, then by all means test the boundaries of 16 million color graphics and make your home page look like a funky 1960's pastel couch. Simplicity is the key to information dissemination and e-commerce. Let's take a look at some cardinal problems.

1) Wrong Website Names. I can't tell you what the right domain name is for your site, only you can. But you must give it some thought. A good analogy comes from television programs. What do 90210 and Melrose Place indicate? Poverty and suffering or beauty, riches, and people in style? What does your domain name make people think about? Is it too complex, like www.no-one-will-type-this.com? Or is it completely irrelevant to your audience? Maybe not, if you have a dog bakery like www.groovydog.com. Maybe that would have been okay too if you were a veterinarian or pet breeder. But don't use a college nick name for business. Finally, if at all possible keep the name short. The phone company didn't pick seven digits for our phone numbers by random chance. Merrill Lynch obviously has a good deal with www.ml.com and Barnes and Noble with www.bn.com.

2) Ignoring the Halo Effect. Please dump the bloated animation. Does anything make you click out of a site faster than a slow-as-molasses Flash intro on the home page that doesn't have a "skip intro" link? How about goofy text or scrolling marquees? These dinosaurs need to leave websites, like Cadillac shed tail fins. Next to a domain name, your home page creates the greatest halo effect. It's the first impression people will get of your site. If they want to share it with others, that's the page they will print and give to others in the office or the Rotary Club. Make it attractive to make a favorite place or bookmark, and have a reasonable title that people will be able to read later when they check their favorite places. Nothing is worse than trying to find a site you surfed two months ago, and all you see in the bookmark list is "home page index," "remote software," or "World 1000," all of which I have encountered.

3) Mismatched Branding. Make sure your site is an extension of your whole marketing image. I saw a religious group's website complete with animation and a fully decked-out site that must have cost a few hundred thousand dollars to create (let alone maintain), and on their home page was a solicitation for donations. I wondered if my ten bucks would have helped the poor or just contributed to another screen with Flash animation? In the same light, be careful of your sponsors. I don't expect to see cigar ads on the American Lung Association page. On the flip side, I'd be surprised if you didn't link to similar sites. Many sites have helped their search ranking by having recipricol links. They used to call that webrings, where like-minded sites can cross advertise their sites.

4) Registration Hell. Okay, someone in your office said that no one is going to be able to look at one precious marketing or sales document until your clients register. They go to your home page only to find fifty neat things they'd like to click on, but first they have to tell about how many kids they have, their shopping tendencies, and whether or not they have three Corvettes and two poodles. Think about it. When was the last time you filled out one of those ridiculous things? In fact, registration pages right off the home page are a surefire recipe to kill a site. The only successful ones give things away, like Jelly Belly did a few years ago. Jelly Belly had a few screens that you need to go through, but they mailed out hundreds of Jelly Belly packets. I've received two, and every once in awhile I go back just to see if they have new free offers. If you are going to make people register, give them a free gift, whether it's a pen, button, pin, brochure, coupon, or jelly beans.

5) Junk Email Purgatory. Second only to registration hell, junk email is a main force in drowning a successful website and reversing any positive halo effect. I love the anti-spam site spam.abuse.net and their educational program towards unsolicited email. If you do happen to receive a client's email, either because they emailed a comment to the webmaster or you found it from one of their corporate brochures, do not email them junk email. A positive way to offer targeted email and manage mailing lists is with third party e-mailing programs like Constant Contact. I'd rather have 300 clients who wanted my electronic notices than 5000 who felt bothered by my well intentioned intrusion.

6) No Unique Viewers. Nothing is worse for a website than to have 100 viewers and no outside press. Is your domain name printed on your stationery and business cards? It should be. Do you need to have a fifty-thousand dollar advertising budget to get noticed? Not at all – Google Adwords campaign is great way to get the word out inexpensively. They offer advertising for just nickels, dimes, and quarters.

7) Dynamic Death Pages. Every since we starting creating dynamic HTML – that is, creating new HTML pages on the fly – we have been dealing with some hard to recreate web pages. Some web developers don't want anyone to bookmark a particular page, because information changes. But sometimes viewers do need to come back to the same place. More importantly, search engines won't log temporary pages that continually change names or locations on your web server. Do you really want to be ignored by Google and Yahoo? Probably not.