4. Give your website visitors a clear call to action.

If your site isn't intended to sell a product or gain a customer, than what is it for? Every page on your site should focus on getting visitor to take an action. This could be purchasing something online, filling out a form or sending an email, making a phone call, or even simply moving on to next step in process. Your website should be more than a static billboard proclaiming that you are open for business- it should compel your visitors to follow a specific path that leads to a sale. The answer can be as simple as placing a prominent suggestion on each of your pages (such as "Request a Free Demo" or "Ask Us a Question").

5. When it comes to your site, don't overlook obvious.

Compare your website to an actual store- is everything clean and organized, or is everything messy and cluttered? Many websites give bad first impressions with issues that could easily be avoided. Broken links are a sign of sloppiness that are fairly common. To combat this, there are several websites that will automatically scan your site and identify any broken links. Seeing little red "x's" where a graphic or photo should appear is another common problem that is easily addressed. Does your site maintain its look and functionality with most browsers? People are sometimes dismayed to learn that their site (which looks great in Internet Explorer) doesn't maintain its look or functionality with other popular browsers such as Netscape. The time and resources required to fix these problems are small when compared with cost of tarnishing your professional image.

There's another trend in scripts that has negative implications. More and more pages are using more and more of them. Collectively they can slow download speeds, even on high speed connections. Each script must be processed by host server. And this can slow things down during times of peak demand on server.

There is no point to using a script you can possibly do without. Certainly none you feel compelled to use can be allowed to crash a download. This amounts to throwing visitors away. Can you really afford to do so?