5 Things To NEVER Do With Your Website

Many small / local businesses build their own websites or hire a friend / relative to build and maintain their site for them due to budgetary restrictions.  And this is ok... most of the time.  However, there are a few basic guidelines you should remember when designing your own site without the help of a seasoned professional.

1. DO NOT:  Have music automatically playing, nothing will piss off your customers faster.  Only exception would be for those in the music industry, and even then think twice before using autoplay.
2. DO NOT:  Use a color scheme that gives your customers a migraine when they go to read your site.  Your restaurant may be Caribbean themed, but you don't need yellow font on top of turquoise background.
3. DO NOT:  Use more fonts than you absolutely have to.  This goes back to the idea of keeping it legible   Most design experts say 3 fonts on a page is the absolute MAX.
4. DO NOT:  Leave your site untouched for years.  Design styles evolve, and so must your site.
5. DO NOT:  Bury the important information 3 or 4 pages into your site.  Always work with the assumption that users will only see your home page and 1 other page max.  Make all pertinent information easy to find.

Knowing that budgets are always tight if you're not going to have a professional build your site you may want to consider hiring someone to conduct a site audit and provide an objective opinion on how to improve your site.  Besides you'll want a non-biased opinion.

Sites like www.elance.com are a great resource to find reasonably priced professionals to conduct an audit.