Internet design and development involves three levels:

1. Internet management
2. Interaction design (navigation support, homepage layout, templates, search, etc.)
3. Content design (the actual writing on the pages)

Just like a hamburger, the middle layer is the tastiest and attracts the most attention. But the outer two layers are vitally important in many ways:
Most users only care about content (in other words, a flashy design is not the message; the message is the message).
The usability of a Website is more a function of how it is managed than of how good its designers are.

Here are some classic mistakes usually made in the managing of the design of a Website.

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1. Purpose, Direction and Function
This is usually one the biggest problem small business Websites tend to have. I am always amazed by how many Websites are simply built using the “we need a Website” rule. There are a lot of companies that can do a great job of designing and building a Website. But there is so much more to a Website than just a business card or brochure on the internet. The problem is a lot of small businesses do not know how or where to find out what their Website should or could achieve for their business. Get hooked in to your Success! We can help!
It is vital these days, to have a Website simply to be considered a professionally run organization (not being on the Internet is like not having email: people might think you are a fly-by-night operation). It is understandable to have a "business-card site" with a small amount of corporate image building, directions to your various facilities, and the annual report and other investor information. However, doing so is not the most effective use of the Internet, and a site along these lines should only be built as a result of an explicit decision not to invest in the active use of the Internet for business.

Most companies should start their Internet design project by finding out ways in which they can provide true customer value on their site. Give users benefits from spending time on your site, allow them to do business with you, and their money will follow.


2. Designing for Your Ego
Internally-focused sites cause companies to end up with home pages full of mission statements, photos of the CEO, and corporate history (all of which do fit on an "about this company" page; just not on the home page). Remember that your company is not the center of the universe for your customers. The customer wants to know what you have done and how you can help. The site should be designed with customers' needs in mind and not to promote ideas of self-importance. Do not build a site that your top executives or friends and family will love: they are not the target audience.

3. Letting the website Structure Mirror Your Orgchart
Users should not have to care how your company is organized, so they should not be able to deduce your organizational structure from the structure of your Website. Admittedly, it is easiest to distribute responsibility for the site to divisions and departments according to already established chains of command and budget categories, but doing so results in an internally-centered site rather than a customer-focused site.
The site structure should be determined by the tasks users will want to perform on your site, even if that means having a single page for information from two very different departments. It is often necessary to distribute information from a single department across two or more parts of the site. The cross linking of information is an integral part of showing your clients not only what you do but how it fits together to be the solution they are looking for.

4. Outsourcing to Multiple Agencies
If you outsource every new Internet project to a new agency, your site will end up looking like one of those quilts assembled from patches by each of the participants in a protest march. The problem with using multiple agencies is that each of them want to put their own stamp on the site: both because they have different design philosophies and because they will want to use you as a reference account. It is no fun to say "we designed such-and-such pages" if all the pages on the site look the same. Here at Marlin Consulting Solutions we ensure your brand is at the fore front and that you best foot is always forward.

Users get very annoyed when they move between pages on a site and find drastically varying designs at every turn. Consistency is the key to usable interaction design: when all interface elements look and function the same, users feel more confident using your site because they can transfer their learning from one product and or service to the next rather than having it seem that if they try another product or service something will be different.
The best way to ensure consistency is to have a single point of contact that is responsible for the design of the entire site. We work with you over the long term to ensure that your goals are met and you continue to be successful. We can help you achieve considerable consistency by having various departments can turn to a single source of design advice.

5. Forgetting to Budget for Maintenance
The old rule of thumb, the annual maintenance budget for a Website should be about the same as the initial cost of building the site, with 50 percent as an absolute minimum. FALSE! Obviously there will be ongoing costs, but we help you eliminate the need for costly updates. The truth that most web design companies don’t want t you find out is that you can do most content updates yourself. If you simply spend the money to build a glamorous site but do not keep it up to date, your investment will very rapidly turn out to be wasted. Updating your website is as easy as sending an email. We can help!
The internet changes so quickly that technology updates and areas of redesign are needed at least once per year simply to avoid an outdated look and to accommodate changing user expectations. We help you when you need our help. Don’t get roped in to multi-year expensive update contracts that only cut away from your bottom line. You can do all the additional maintenance that is needed throughout the year to bring fresh content online, reorganize and revise old pages, and avoid linkrot( broken and outdated links). You might say to yourself what if I don’t want to do it, we can do it for it you. You have unlimited options we are here to help, we can take over while you are on vacation or manage your site permanently until your business has grown to point of hiring a full time web technologist.

Once you have established a design style guide and a set of page templates in order to avoid the inconsistencies mentioned under Mistake 4, your budget for maintenance of these design resources. If the style guide and templates do not evolve with changing needs, you will rapidly see design entropy set in and the site will fall apart. The most common example is the need for new stock graphics, new header graphics, new navigation buttons, or new icons. Just remember consistency is the key, keep your brand recognizable threw out your Internet site.
6. Treating the Internet as a Secondary Medium
On most occasions it tends to be more difficult to try and take traditional non-Internet content, and convert it website content. The Internet is a new medium. It's different from television, it's different from printed newspapers, and it's different from glossy brochures, so you cannot create a good website out of content optimized for any of these other media. The old analogy still holds: movies are not made by filming a play and putting the camera in the best seat of the theater.

The only way to get great Internet content is to have your staff develop the content for the Internet. If you have a need for printed collateral treat it as a separate entity. Do not let you your website and print collateral suffer from trying to treat them the same.

7. Wasting Linking Opportunities
The Internet is a linking medium: the hypertext links are what ties it together and allow users to discover new and useful information. Most companies have religiously include their URLs in all advertising, TV commercials, press releases, and even in the products themselves (ever bought underwear with a URL woven into it?). The one thing that you should keep in mind is that you don’t have to link to your homepage in your ads. If a potential customer gets interested in a new product or a special offer, you should not force the client to find out how to navigate the site from the homepage to the product page. Instead, try linking directly to the product page from the ad. Also, don’t be afraid to seed press releases with specific URLs that support your message: reporters may follow these links for additional detail and online publications may use specific links instead of generic ones to better serve their users.
If you are running a campaign with a certain theme, have it include a URL to a page that follows up on that theme. The payoff page should not be a copy of the ad (the customer presumably already read the ad before going to the site), though a link to an online version of the ad might be appropriate to help users who go to the page without having seen the ad. Instead, use each medium for what it's good at. For example, a game company could use TV commercials to show case the games looks and then use the Internet to allow them to play a simplified or trial version of the game.

8. Treating Internet and Intranet Sites the Same
Internal intranet sites need to be managed very differently from public Internet sites. The key difference is that each company only has a single intranet and thus can manage it to a much greater degree of consistency and predictability. (This is why there are separate usability guidelines for intranet design.)

Also, employees use the intranet for corporate productivity, meaning that any waste of users' time is a direct hit to the bottom line. I am appalled when I hear of intranet managers who put advertising on their site to pay for their equipment costs. If, for example, the value of an average employee's time is $1 per minute and users spend 3 seconds more per page because of the ads, then each ad costs the company 5 cents in lost employee productivity. Even if the MIS department makes 2 cents per ad (a typical CPM of $20), the net loss to the company is 3 cents.

9. Confusing Market Research and Usability Engineering
Thankfully, many sites have embraced the value of customer data for design, but unfortunately many of them rely solely on traditional market research like focus groups. Most of these methods relate to creating desire for a product and getting it sold and do not provide detailed information about how people operate the product. A Internet design is an interactive product, and therefore usability engineering methods are necessary to study what happens during the user's interaction with the site.

Users are not designers: no matter how many focus groups you run, they cannot tell you how to design your navigation. Focus groups are great for getting information about users' current concerns and areas where they would like help, but they will rarely teach you how to reinvent the fundamental way you do business. Listening carefully to customers will often reveal frustrations that can turn into opportunities for improvement, but once you have an idea for an improvement, you must create a prototype design and try it out with users in a usability test to see whether it really works for them.

There are endless stories of customers who say in focus groups that they would love a certain feature, but who never use it once it is launched because it is too cumbersome, too expensive, or doesn't really meet their needs in real use. The point is that market research forms the starting point but has to be supplemented with usability engineering if you want a design that works when people try to use it.

You may commission a traditional market research firm to question thousands of customers to measure whether they like your website more or less than your competition. Once you know that your site scores, say, 5.6 and your worst competitor scores 5.9, you may know that you need to improve, but you will not know how or what to improve. Specific insights into the detailed design of your site and the parts that must change because they are confusing, slow users down, or do not match the way users want to work can be derived from watching four or five users as they actually use your site to perform real tasks. A day or two in the usability lab and you will have a long list of changes that will improve your design.

10. Underestimating the Strategic Impact of the Internet
It is a huge mistake to treat the Internet as if it were an online brochure and manage it as such. The Internet should be considered one of the most important determinants for the way you will do business in the future. The internet enables companies to compete in new ways such as true globalization (for example, "work-around-the-clock", where projects are passed on to teams as the globe turns). If you don't grasp these new business opportunities you could be losing out time and time again on potential opportunities and revenue.