Most websites are intended to generate sales leads, but few have any "calls-to-action" to effectively harvest leads and automate follow-up. What sales tracking, shopping cart abandonment, and retargeting technologies have you deployed with your site?

New or home businesses often wish to project a status larger than what they actually are, and this is fine. It's not deceitful to design your website to convey a well established business with resources comparable to the big guys, but there are easy pitfalls to avoid that could otherwise give you away.

A responsive website is no longer a luxury, but a requirement. Google will penalize all websites that are not responsive to mobile browsing, but most Content Management Systems allow oyu to control what content can be consumed by each medium - desktop, tablet, and mobile, and your design and information strategy should reflect this.

Sizzle-over-steak websites are designed as eye candy to dazzle and impress visitors, and usually promote services over products. Style is important of course, but design choices should have continuity with the services it's designed to promote.

Online retailers often build around a database of products that can cross promote each other, and allow for easy navigation, categorization, and selection of products. These websites often use design to feed into the backend shopping cart, and promote discounted items.

If it is your intent to promote products, sales, events, staff, whichever, your design choice should reflect this, as well as the tools you employ in your site. For instance, carousels, expandable content, sliders and such maximize the data you can display in the least amount of space without browsing or clicking.

Without a clear objective, most websites often become online brochures with little conversion strategy. If this is the case with your site, your design choices should reflect that objective, and promote your credibility instead of products or services.

Customer engagement is an excellent way to build loyalty, but what methods do your communiocation strategies include? Is there a blog that supports customer feedback. Do you have comment boxes on each page. Have you built a community forum allowing your customers to communicate with each other? How do these strategies feed into your social media pages? Are they bidirectional?

Why should people do business with you? What is your unique selling proposition (USP)? If you cannot answer these questions, you'll have a tought time articulating a message to visiters, or distinuishing yourself from your competition. The biggest myth in software and websites is, "if you build it, they will come", so craft a narrative.