At last count, there were more than 36MM websites (NetCraft Research - www.netcraft.com) out on the Internet. By my informal estimate well over 90% of them were not designed to be useful to end-users, but instead to satisfy some need of the builder. While that may work for personal websites, this is not a productive model for business or corporate sites. Therefore, you should consider the following five factors to ensure your site achieves its objectives.

Goals for the Site: Many organizations never formally even consider what the overall goals for their site are before or during its construction. Often this is an after thought or more often they see something a competitor has done and decide they want that for themselves, much like a kid in a candy store. Properly organized and with appropriate features, service organization websites can take it one step further by enabling a customer to walk through some of their common business problems and potential solutions from the service provider. This then makes the site more useful in driving revenue and a key part of the organization's efforts, rather than flat uninteresting brochure-ware. Product oriented business have it a little easier. The focus here is to clearly, quickly convey information about the product.

Money, Lots and Lots of Money: If the dotcom crash taught us anything its that every site, no matter how small or insignificant, has to keep revenue (either direct or indirect) top of mind. That means you cannot bury that lead generation tool 10 clicks into the site. It means you have to think through how a customer who may be casually surfing your site can be brought to a purchase decision and begin (or complete) the transaction online. That spells trouble for you.

Resources to Build and Maintain the Site: Some enlightened organizations go through a large and robust site development effort and ensure the three items above do not victimize them. However, when it comes to the long haul and keeping the site looking fresh and interesting over time, they fail miserably. Because, they failed to consider and budget for the resources necessary to maintain a fresh look and feel to the site on an ongoing basis. Pick more evergreen content, features and other value adds that you know your customers will appreciate. Don't try to replicate MSNBC.com, Your customers will appreciate it. If you do not have these resources, then be smart and do not set that expectation.

Simple Dos and Don'ts: No article on this topic would be complete without a few design Dos and Don'ts. DO put individual email addresses if you highlight bios of key staff on your site, you would be surprised what leads you might get. DON'T Flash, Blink, Beep or Honk. Its hard to describe exactly how irritating, and disorienting this can be from an end-user perspective. Suffice it to say, imagine seeing and hearing nothing else. This is even more important for commercial sites where advertising plays a key part of the business model. The more outlandish you make your site, the even more garish your advertisers will have to make their advertisements to grab customers attention, and the net result will be that your customers run screaming the other way. DO periodically watch where your customers are going on your site (versus where you want them to go) and adjust the access to those areas accordingly. Frankly, no designer can predict with 100% surety where customers will gravitate to on a site. DON'T put "Under Construction", "Coming Soon", "Check Back Often" or any other such thing on your site.

Some of these factors may not be relevant to your site. However, in the off chance this may not be true, its worth a quick double check don't you think?