Oh Steve Jobs, you’ve read my mind. You also started a discussion that is long overdue. Job’s wrote an open letter today about Flash and why Apple has chosen to still not support the software made by Adobe. He makes some good points. I agree on all of them.

There are so many websites (especially restaurant websites) that are built in flash, it just boggles my mind. It’s extremely frustrating when you’re on a mobile device searching for a restaurant. You’ll do a quick search, get the website and location, but when you access the site to check out their menu, hours and delivery details it’s usually a site built in flash, UGH! Even if your phone was able to display the flash content, typically it’s really tacky, tasteless design thats hard to navigate. Usually I get frustrated and move on to the next restaurant.

Calling all restaurant owners! Make the change now! If you want your business to be bustling, then you better order up an experienced designer to build your site hopefully in CSS3 and make your site mobile friendly. Most people will do last minute searches for a restaurant, so not only does your site need a search presence, it also needs to be easily read and optimized for mobile devices.

Every industry has experts. They have years of experience, and can make decisions from the gut that some can’t or may have a hard time doing. Most times companies will take the low road of hiring within even if it comes at a cost of potentially ruining a company. Don’t make this mistake. Just because an employee may have taken a web design class in college is by no means a foundation for them to be a Web Designer, let alone Art Director. Management will usually opt to not spend time and resources searching for the rock-star candidate. They will happily settle for less, if it means less hassle and less money to spend.

If your business is in a situation where it finds itself in dire need of an expert, please hire one. The expense that it may cost upfront for a seasoned pro is far less expensive than the misery you will put your business through promoting the wrong person.

You need someone who has a lightbulb going off all the time throughout the day. A true creative visionary. Someone who doesn’t hoard their ideas because they’re so abundant. There are plenty of people like this out there, the question is, if it is a matter of your business surviving from their ideas, are you willing to financially support this need to save your business?

This morning on my commute I was reading an article in Businessweek’s iPhone app. After scrolling a few times due to the content being so long I became uninterested in the rest of the article and went back to listening to music. I didn’t feel like reading a novel on my 10 minute commute.

This got me thinking, if Businessweek created an app for the iPhone to make their content more accessible on mobile devices, then why did I become uninterested in it half way through? The content was just too long for an article that could get to the point quicker. This is where I think the old 200-500 word article count is soon to be thrown out the window.

Businesses need to start writing with mobile users in mind. Short, headline driven articles thats all. Get to the facts fast and make your point. If you create a piece of software for use on a mobile device, be sure the purpose it serves is for what it is intended to do, make reading on mobile devices easy.

The next major leap in web marketing is mobile devices. More people have web enabled mobile devices than personal computers now. Many have also already ditched their land lines for far superior and affordable mobile phones. The next piece of outdated technology to go is the desktop computer. Once web based operating systems take over, you’re going to see an explosion of new mobile devices that will replace old and out of date clunky desktops. People are living faster paced lifestyles in which time is limited and if you want your product to sell, being in front of your customer in the palm of their hand wherever they go is a no brainer. This is an area where you need to establish yourself now in the mobile marketing arena.

Having a mobile version of your website is an absolute necessity. Mobile sites are more text oriented and they should load fast, so images should be used sparingly. Ensure that your customer can easily navigate the site and find what they’re looking for quickly. Adapting an appropriate mobile strategy to co-exist with your current web strategies will ensure you don’t lose customers who may be far more mobile savvy.

The fastest growing mobile trend right now are unique applications (apps) that run on the phones operating system. Devices like Apple’s iPhone is in the lead with thousands of easily downloadable applications most being free or little to no cost at all. Apple’s share of the mobile market is growing rapidly and far exceeding expectations.

Apple has claimed over 2 billion applications have been downloaded. Thats a massive market that is still new and has unlimited potential. It would be in your businesses best interest to start researching how an application for the iPhone could benefit you.

Google recently acquired the company AdMob for $750mil which reinforces the idea and reality of mobile becoming the next big thing.

1 – Letting internal business politics influence website design

Just because an executive may like the color blue doesn’t mean thats the best decision or direction a website should go based on his/her taste and opinion alone. And just because you may want to kiss up and do what the boss says, you’re making a larger mistake in the long run. You will always be respected for doing the right thing and maintaining your artistic integrity then to sell out for quick and cheap short lived praise from the boss. Most businesses run with the “what have you done for me lately model” so a mistake like this can bite you back. There are ways to avoid these situations and easy compromises can be made if you approach the subject professionally with statistics to back you up. If an executive thinks a purple, green and orange color scheme represents the new product best, have documented proof that it doesn’t and discuss how using an alternative and complementing color scheme can be more successful.

2 – Launching prematurely

Personally I think this happens everywhere, even though a few companies have their launch strategy down pretty well, there are some that will just always jump the gun. Most times executives get a little too excited about a new product and think that a site can be launched prematurely, a.k.a. a “soft launch”. Just because it is mocked up in Photoshop doesn’t mean it can be made live the next day. There are so many components to releasing a large corporate site that launching early with limited features will just wind up turning into a mess. There needs to be design sensitivity training for management that focuses on timelines and why it is important to stick by them.

3 – Re-designing for the hell of it

This one of the biggest wastes of time for a designer. Just because your competitor has revamped their site doesn’t mean you have to do the same. There needs to be a clear strategy behind changing your design and not just because it looks cool.

4 – Understaffing and overworking

Having one designer work on a major corporate site is down right insane. I’ve seen it plenty. Not only can you burn them out on working on one project for months at a time, the room for error increases because of the repetitiveness they are engaging in and sheer volume of multitasking they are performing. No matter how great a designer is, and at no fault to his/her own, everyone benefits from having their work reviewed or collaborated with another person. For a major news publication styled site, there should be at least three designers. One for designing core elements such as navigation, page layout. One for CSS and page styling, and one for accents such as buttons, banners etc.

5 – Involving novices for senior decision making

Sometimes team building is best left to staff events. Although newcomer input should always be valued, and is a great way to make them feel more a part of the team, involving newly hired or entry level designers to make decisions that can significantly impact the businesses bottom line is a big no no. Senior people are senior because they have years of experience under their belts and know how to avoid amateur mistakes that a new designer may make to get his/her name known.

Always go with a senior designers advice, even if the boss thinks the newbie is cutting edge and has thousands of people following their twitter account.

6 – Not adhering to Best Practices

Skipping steps. Yes there’s a time and place when deadlines supersede certain processes, but if there is a formal procedure of doing things always stick to it. I have seen first hand the simplest of mistakes slip through for the sake of getting something out in a haphazardly way.

7 – Prematurely partnering for quick bucks

So a new site has alot of buzz, and they get a ton of traffic to their site. You’re in a position to partner up and looks like a win win. All of a sudden a month later, the site goes belly up with some type of scandal, and your name is dragged through the mud with them. Now it’s time for damage control. Cleaning up the mess of your company being associated with a scandal. You spend more time scouring message boards to clear your name then you spent putting into the partnering decision in the first place.

Bottom line, do business with reliable and established businesses. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon for a quick buck. Always think long term.

Theres really no excuse nowadays to make the mistakes previous companies have made on the web. Your site should be tasteful with a balance between look, functionality, readability and also optimized for search engines. Stay away from heavy flash animations and images. Avoid using text inside images. Instead use html text over images. Text is your friend. Remember the more relevant and unique content on your site the more you’ll be crawled by search engines spiders which in turn results in better organic ranking.

Here’s a quick checklist for your website launch.

Grammar, writing style and spell check. Make sure the customer can easily understand your offering. Don’t ramble on about your products. State the facts in bullet points and a few sentences. An simply resolved issue such as misspelling lends to a lack of credibility so always double spell check. If you don’t take the time and effort to check your work, that ultimately represents you and your business. Write with the masses in mind. Use simple and short as your guideline to writing content for your site. Too much content even if well written will be skipped over. We are a headline driven culture and have learned to read that way. We like short to the point headlines. So stick to small paragraphs and bullets.

Navigation. So important. Most commonly, top navigation or left bar navigation. Many sites have un-intuitive navigation layouts that confuse people. Be sure every page links to its proper section and can cross link back via a site-map. Try and use an easy to understand naming convention for your navigation sections and the pages they link to. Create a site map. Site maps list out every link on the site with its proper section. Site maps also carry value with Web crawlers since this gives a quick snapshot of your sites layout.

Broken links. Ugh, sometimes it just happens when designing a site that you may mis-link a page that won’t exist. Test every link on your site before launching. Not only does it look bad to have broken links on your site, web crawlers may even rank you negatively because of broken links. The best thing to do is to make a custom 404 page instead of getting the default “page cannot be found” that your browser displays. Creating a custom page with a link back to the homepage ensures a better customer experience. This gives the user the option to look around on your site rather than just leaving your site.

Add a sense of community. Add a review and comments section or even better a discussion forum. People want to know about a businesses service and track record before they buy. To build credibility, user reviews are important as well as making other users feel a sense of community on your site. Adding a forum is a great way also of letting your customers speak to each other regarding your product.

So you’re ready to start your website. You have a great name and idea, now you need to get your site online. The decision to choose a web hosting company should be based off of word of mouth or reviews on forums and discussion boards. Frustrated customers will certainly let everyone know if they’ve been burned by bad service. To start look for a company that has been around for a few years. Don’t just look for a cheap deal from a company that just setup shop! They’ll probably be growing pains and issues. Make sure the company has a reasonable up time for their sites as well as a 24/7 support number or email address to contact someone if your site happens to go down overnight.

Be sure to choose a dedicated IP address and not a shared IP. An IP address is the actual number (like a phone number) associated with your domain name. A dedicated IP address is best as an insurance policy against your site being grouped together with either competitor or malicious sites. Shared IP addresses can move your site within different groups on a server.

Web hosts are generally $9.99 to $100 or more a month and depends on certain factors. Size of site content, how much traffic will be coming to your site, and the use of a dedicated IP address. To start, the $25-50 range is about right for a startup web business.

First and foremost, your current business or your business idea.

Most ideas and businesses are created out of necessity. Whether it’s financial goals or to make your life easier or both. When creating an online business, your website is your storefront and represents you and your offering. Being honest, maintaining integrity and credibility with customers will ensure your success. Always stick to your gut first decision even if it fails. Learn from your mistakes even though trying to avoid them.

To start your site you need a domain name (www.businessname.com) website content (text and images), knowledge of a web site program to create your site, or hire a designer. There are some good free website template resources available also that are basically pre-built (like a pre-fab house) you just need to add content (like adding furniture to your new pre-fab house). Having your content written and organized before you build the site is ideal. Try to shoot for at least 20 pages of content to launch your site.

This site was created with you in mind to answer your questions and give you insight in a quick, simple and understandable way.