You've probably seen articles that cover "Top Ten Web Design Mistakes" or something to that effect. They all seem to say same things, don't they? No animation, keep appearance professional, use easy navigation, and so on. You've done everything those articles told you to do, but your site still isn't making progress you'd like. What's wrong?

You know, out of all ebooks I've seen - and all articles on Web design I've read - one thing is rarely mentioned. You would think, since this element is absolutely vital to any Web site's success, that it would be talk of town. That one vital element is... your customer.

Before you read another article or ebook on Web site design, consider these facts:

* Your customer is reason you are in business. * Your customer pays your bills. * Your Web site should be specifically and intentionally designed to meet your customer's every need. * In order to design your site to meet his/her needs, you must first know who your customer is.

Once you discover who your perfect customer is, and what needs he/she is looking to you to fill, you can apply all those other techniques in "Top Ten Web Design Mistakes" articles with great success. But questions remain - "Who is your target customer" and "What does he/she want from you"?

According to prolific copywriter Nick Usborne, a survey conducted among readers of his email newsletter "Excess Voice," which is available at nickusborne.com, offers some interesting results. They seem to be split almost three ways: one-third consists of copywriters, another content writers and final third both.

This is an important debate, I believe, since all online copy is content but not all content is copy. And that's a real problem.

Most designers, webmasters and writers develop content for their websites in a way to educate their visitors. They also write it with notion that "content is king," "content raises search engine rankings," "content makes a website sticky" and so on.

That's all fine and good. But in my estimation, web content fails when it strives only at informing reader, and lacks important elements that take reader "by hand" and compels them to do something -- anything, including simple act of reading.

In other words, while some may compel our attention, many sites fail to propel our actions, too. And their owners often scream, "Why is my site not producing any sales," "why is it so heavily trafficked but getting such a poor response" or "why are people leaving so quickly (or after they got what they came for)?"

Well, if content was king, copy should be castle.

The Internet is not a traditional medium in broadcast sense. It is intimate, dynamic and interactive. People are more involved when reading content of a website than reading a conventional print publication or watching a TV commercial. With Internet, people also have a powerful weapon, and they usually never think twice about using it when need confronts them: their mouse.