Santa’s judgement isn’t only reserved for little boys and girls, rumor has it he’s moved on to websites. Let’s take a look at a couple of things that can make your website land on the naughty or nice list.

Naughty

• Having a website to simply “build awareness.” Even Santa would put coal in your stocking for putting this as your top priority when building a website. What do you want to build awareness for? Your non-profit? Then your goal should be raise money or cause people to take a specific action. What about your business? Then you, obviously, would want to sell more.
• Heavy Flash animations: Most of the time Flash isn’t needed. Always ask yourself, “Does this help the customer make a purchasing decision?” If not, scrap it. Flash slows down your computer, can’t be viewed on many mobile devices, and most of all, isn’t necessary.
• Never changing your website. Your website should be growing and changing all the time. After all, your customers are. You should always be testing new ways to reach your customers and tell your story better.
• Focus on the “experience.” You hardly ever want to have an experience on the web, you usually want to get to the information as quickly as possible. While your website should match your brand, the experience should be about your product or service and not about your website. If a visitor to your site can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll jump off - no matter how good the “experience” is.
• Make all of your ads point to the homepage. If you have someone clicking an ad about “Red Socks” (maybe Santa is shopping), send them to a page with red socks - not the homepage. You already know what the customer is searching for, give them that information.

Nice

• Use open-source tools. No one should be tied to a “proprietary” anything if your goals can be accomplished without them. There is an open-source solution for almost anything. Since no one owns open-source (hence the “open” part), you don’t have to worry about the company going belly-up or deciding to increase their prices.
• Have an awesome Q&A/FAQ section. Think about the way you would make a purchase and the common questions that your customer service people receive. Those questions should be on the website, and be easy to find.
• Focus on your content. The design of the website is great, but most people forget to focus on the content - after all, that’s the meat of why people visit your site. Amazon.com is one of the ugliest sites ever, but its sales top billions of dollars a year - because they focus on the content.
• Use analytics. There is no excuse for not having analytics on your website (Google Analytics is even free). This will give you more information than you could possibly imagine about the visitors to your website.
• Find a way to keep in touch with your customers. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter or email, you should give customers a way to keep in touch with your company. This will allow you to communicate with them about new products, offerings and discounts.