Make your site permission-based marketing ready. We recommend Seth Godin's "Permission Marketing" book http://www.permission.com/. He champions building a long term-relationship with a customer by asking permission to continue to market to that customer and incorporating value/information in all marcom processes.

Ensure your site is optimized for search engines. Identify eight-12 keywords that people will use to find your site. Incorporate these keywords into your site content (to drive relevancy with search engine spiders/bots) and then manually submit your site to top ten search engines. We don't recommend most of free or $19.99 specials available; yes, all will get your site registered with search engines, but getting listed on page 75 of 350 pages (for example) won't really drive qualified traffic to your site. You need page 1-3 listings on top ten engines to really drive qualified traffic.

Delve into your log server files to uncover "digital tracks" made through your Web site. Your log files are raw files that show how and from where (in most cases) people accessed your Web site, where they went on your site, how long they stayed, etc.

Think global in your overall site design. The greatest Internet growth is occurring outside North America, so it is essential to build a site that can be accessed easily by people around world. What issues do you need to look at? 1) Load times are very important.

2) Develop content that avoids colloquialisms that may not be understood by others who may not speak same language. 3) You may want to make your site's content available in diverse languages (there are a number of emerging applications that will facilitate this process), ensuring your e-commerce capabilities can be utilized by all.

5) Visitors typically scan web pages, rather than read them word for word. Keeping this in mind, use descriptive headlines and subheads, write concisely, and make important points stand out by highlighting them or using different colored text.

6) Certain bright colors such as red and yellow cause more strain on human eye than others. Use such colors sparingly on your site if you want to encourage visitors to stay on your site longer. Otherwise, eye strain may cause them to leave prematurely.

7) Since visitors typically scan web pages, hyperlinks within text of a web page should be relatively short (consisting of few words), yet very descriptive of where they lead to.

8) Two reasons to use ALT attribute in HTML code of your web pages: A) It can be used to slightly improve search engine ranking. B) It can tell visually impaired (or those who surf with graphics turned of in their browsers) what image is.

9) How many clicks does it take to get to your online order form? Many webmasters have found that fewer clicks required, better. In other words, easier you make it to buy from you, more likely people will.

10) Beware of common problems with using frames on a web site: A) A large percentage of surfers dislike them. B) They can be confusing and awkward for users. C) It's tricky to get HTML just right. D) Search engines have problems indexing past home page.