Top mistakes our research has uncovered:

Site is not focused. Visitors do not know what it's all about, or worse.. what's expected of them. Remove all clutter not related to selling your special service. Such as hit counters, weather, news-feeds and links.

Me, Us, Me, Me, We, Us, Our..... It's NOT about YOU. It's about the customer. And their problems, desires and needs. Potential clients really don't care WHAT you do, or HOW you do it - only what's in it for them.

Most sites we study disregard common, proven successful sales tactics. This is perhaps easy to understand, since sites are easy to set up and usually designed by either tekkies or attorneys lacking experience in salesmanship.

Other notes we made:

There is little relationship between quality and success. Some successful sites we studied paid as little as $10 per page, others spent thousands. It is difficult to figure out where the value is. Many successful sites are deceivingly simple and created on the kitchen table. But they work. Some law firms have spent tens of thousands of dollars on their sites - but producing very few clients. They might "look great" but if they don't produce... what's the use?

It would be easy to say that if you have a beautiful site people will flock to it and stay. But that's not true. If your competitor's site lets people do more and get more value you will be stuck with a pretty site that sits there gathering cyberdust.

Owning FrontPage, or PageMill or NetObject's Fusion does not make a person a web designer. Although design is important, it is the content that sell your site. Words sell better than graphics. Every time.

Most sites completely disregard business objectives.

Designers are proud of their web sites. No matter how low on the practicality scale the site is. This makes it difficult for the web owner to understand that a different type of change is needed.

Few sites have any regard for how the average target visitor will react to the site.