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Merrick, NY—Is your website working for you or against you? The worst mistake a business can make online, of course, is not having a website at all—but here, excerpted from an article on the online technology site Mashable.com, is a list of the five most common design mistakes small businesses make on their websites.

1. Navigation. Good navigation can keep visitors engaged longer, potentially creating more customers, whereas poor navigation can unintentionally frustrate visitors. If they’re looking for specific information and can’t find it, they may get the impression your business is equally disorganized. Use common intuitive navigation techniques that average visitors expect. For example, group your most important links like product collections, store hours and phone numbers and such on top, leaving less sought after areas like account settings or legal information on bottom.
2. No clear calls to action. Your website shouldn’t be just a continuous stream of descriptive information; at some point it needs to clearly spur the user to action. Examples of luxury jewelers’ calls to action might be a purchase, a mailing list sign-up, or an incentive to visit the store; whatever it is, make it clear and don’t make users work too hard to figure it out.
3. Color and contrast. Your store décor may be a masterful use of tasteful subtlety, but if there isn’t enough contrast between background and type on your web site, some viewers may have trouble reading it. Color and contrast also are excellent tools for directing the viewer through the hierarchy of the page. Test yours with this free color contrast tool.
4. Content presentation. Many businesses get so caught up in overloading the user with information that they overlook the importance of how it’s presented. People generally scan, rather than read, a site quickly to get to key points. Make those stand out through good use of white space, line breaks between paragraphs, headings, sub-headings, bullets, and so forth. And never underestimate the importance of proper grammar and punctuation.
5. Too much clutter. Edit, edit, edit. And edit again. Prioritize your content, just as you would merchandise in a showcase. The key is to aid the website visitor in finding what they came looking for. 

Read the entire article here for more details and how-to on each point.