Recently I spoke to a client of mine who had just made 250,000 from his website in the 12 months since we had designed it for him. His old website had generated approximately nothing. Zero. Was his previous site expensive? No. He wanted to keep the cost of the site down so he had it built through a friend of a friend for 'mates rates'.
So he wasn't losing anything, was he?

Yes, he was losing the 250,000 he could have made the previous year. In fact, in the four years before he set up his new website with a professional web designer, not having an effective website was actually costing him 1million in lost revenue and all for the sake of spending between 1-2,000 to get an effective website.

So how much did it cost to set up your website? How much do you spend on hosting and marketing the site? How much money would you be making if it was performing at its full potential? Every website is different - but there are some fundamental rules to having an effective website. If you are guilty of any of these 11 mistakes then get in touch with a professional web designer.

1) Nobody can find you. Have you ever had a set of company brochures printed that are still sat in your office somewhere? Never to see the light of day? How many businesses do this with their websites? Let me ask you a question - how many different ways do people have of finding your website?

Here are some of the most common:
• Pay per click advertising
• Search engine optimisation
• Email marketing
• General Directories (e.g. yell.com)
• Trade directories (e.g. Applegate)
• Affiliate programmes
• Article submissions
• Video submissions
• Banner advertising

These are just online strategies! What about offline?
• Business cards
• Invoices
• Packaging
• Brochures
• Direct mail
• Advertising
• Vehicle/in-store signage

How many of these are you using? If it's not at least eight, your website is underperforming.
2) Your content is unclear, hard to read, boring - or all three. A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Make sure your text is easy to read by using:

• Sub-headlines
• Bullet points
• Highlighted keywords
• Short paragraphs
• A simple writing style, and
• Speaking in your customers language - no jargon, waffle or 'marketese'

3) You have no 'calls to action'. One of the classic mistakes in marketing - telling your customers how great your product or service is, but not how to buy it, or how to get in touch. Make it clear and easy for your customers to buy, enquire, join your newsletter - whatever you want them to do, make it clear what the next step is. When browsing the internet people are lazy and will simply browse onto another site if you don't get them to act on whatever interest your website has aroused in them.

So, include special offers, 'buy now' buttons, offer people a free brochure, tell them to call your free phone number (now!), complete your online form - but tell them to do something or you could be wasting money driving people to the site who then find it too easy to leave the site without taking any action.

Remember - your website has a conversion rate - it might be three in 100 people that visit the site, buy or enquire from you - if you increase that conversion rate by, say, 50%, you increase your website revenue by 50%! There are many ways of doing this - simply speak to a reputable website designer who will guide you with the right content.

4) You are not keeping in touch with potential customers. How many websites have you visited where you have been 'researching' a potential purchase or looking at something that you were interested in, but it wasn't quite the right time to buy that product or service? Well guess what - people are doing with your website? So the question is - how do you find out who these people are - and how do you keep in touch with them?

Gather their details - people will trade their contact details for something of value. Why not offer a free guide on how to choose their purchase? A free 'trial' of your product or service? Maybe a subscription to a newsletter or website that will have lots of useful benefits? A 'VIP' Club? All they need to do is give you their name, address, phone number and email address.

You would be amazed at how many businesses have huge customer databases they do absolutely nothing with. There are two simple ways of staying in touch - the passive way is to have a section of your website you regularly update (you will need a good content management system to do this), a better way is to send direct mail either by email or by the traditional postal system. If you do, guess who these prospects will go to when it is the right time for them to buy?
If not? You could be wasting thousands of pounds driving traffic to your site, generating interest in your product or service, only to let them slip through your fingers and into the grateful arms of your competitors.

5) You have a poor website design. Have you ever clicked onto a website only to be immediately unimpressed and clicked straight off again? The choice of colour on the website is not only important for the visual appeal of the website design but also for usability of the website. Lack of contrast between the background and colour and the font colour on the website can make the font difficult to read and have a negative effect on the usability of the website. It is important to keep the colour scheme in mind when designing your web site. One of the popular principles in web design suggests that you should not use more than three colours in the design of your website.

You wouldn't send out a marketing brochure that's all words and no pictures. So why do so many companies create web pages without graphics or photos of any sort? If a single picture paints a thousand words, use a judicious number of them on your website to communicate volumes. Photos of your store or office, your products, your employees -- these images make your business feel "real" to online visitors. Images give you a tangible presence and let visitors get a sense of the kind of business you run.

6) Your website is confusing to use. Jakob's Law of the Web User Experience states that "users spend most of their time on other websites." This means that they form their expectations for your site based on what's commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.

Visitors to your website will use the navigation on your site to find information that is interest to them. Your own business or your web design company may have a good knowledge of your website and its structure so you may not have trouble locating information. However visitors to your website are less likely to have this knowledge and will rely purely on navigation that is available on the website.

Navigation is mostly available in the form of menus. The menu should be consistent on every page to avoid confusion. Customer behaviours and trends also need to be considered when designing the website. Studies have also shown that web surfers prefer the standard left or right side navigation over other layouts.

7) Your content is out of date. 'Latest news - last updated 2003'… Ever seen that on a website? What about when you ring a business to enquire about a product that's on their website and they tell you they don't stock it anymore? The vast majority of small business owners still either can't update their own website, or they don't.

If they can't it's often because:
• They don't have any kind of content management at all
• Their content management is difficult or complicated to use
• They have had no training
• They get no support, there's no-one to ring to ask questions, or if there is they are held in a queue

So when hiring a web design company ask for a demonstration of the content management system, and ask how and if they will keep in to