You sell widgets and you have a website. Said website can be your marketing, sales, and support team all in one. Or it could be a huge waste of money. Unfortunately the latter is more often the case. Most websites are lousier than lousy. Some look good but lack functionality and others have functionality hidden beneath gaudy layout and color schemes. And this is just a basic benchmark. What about the variety of technical obscenities end users must endure? Many without even knowing it?
Here are some thoughts on three subtle vulgarities in web design.
Proper markup: Not only is the correct use of X/HTML and Cascading Stylesheets an easy way to boost the next two considerations, it also gets you in with the search engines. Failing to realize that a web-page will be viewed by machines more often than humans is the biggest mistake you can make. Shoddy markup is everywhere, even on the home pages of the most powerful corporations in the world. They may do fine (for a while), but for small businesses this is even more important. The difference between sites that structure pages correctly and get picked up by Google and those that don't could be thousands of page views.
Using intelligent structured markup also allows current users to find information more easily. For example, all title tags should be meaningful so site-search results can be scanned. This approach affords a natural organization, a bonus for what I'll talk about in bullet 3.
Accessibility: This is important for everyone. My very large and prominent health insurance company has one of the worst websites ever. The homepage looks passable, but the real problems occur after logging-in. Attempting to find needed information quickly is a disaster from start to finish. Now imagine what it's like if you're blind or otherwise eyesight impaired. Images where there should be text is my big concern: these cannot be interpreted by text-to-speech synthesizers or outputted to braille.
My second concern involves the complexity of pages. The amount of garbage in the way of the "meat" adds unnecessary time to an alternative browsing experience. Have you ever waded through a long, complicated telephone menu trying to get tech support? This is the same experience for anyone having web-pages read to them by a computer. In fact, even fully able users with the latest version of IE and Firefox might find this navigation problematic (me!).
Organization: This brings me to my third point. Keep things organized! If any Massachusetts readers hold car insurance policies through Commerce Insurance and have tried paying their bill on-line, you have a perfect example. The cable company, RCN, used to be really atrocious too, but improved with a recent redesign. It's still not clear why they continue running a web news portal though.
Organization, by definition, is about simplifying. Taking a chaotic mess and reducing it to the simplest possible state. This includes: eliminating the superfluous, applying consistent labeling, and making additions when it improves clarity. It's like the long lost art of writing. If you want to learn how to organize a website, I'd suggest revisiting one of many great writing primers: The Element of Style by Strunk & White (it's $4!), or my favorite Writing With Style by John Trimble. If you can't compose a sentence, how can you build a website, or write software, or do anything? The fundamental skills required, which may be the foundation of all art, appear to be the same. Read or re-read these and then move on to Jakob Nielsen.