Your website is your 24/7 salesperson. If it is designed properly, it can bring targeted leads to your business. However, many web designers only focus on the aesthetic part of the site. Although it is important to have a beautiful website, it must be user-friendly and marketable too. If your website cannot convert, it is useless.

Now, let me share with you 8 deadly web design mistakes that many designers make:

1. Building the website entirely with frames or Flash. This really complicates things and makes the website not user friendly. Visitors will have trouble bookmarking the sites and there will be no unique URL to identify every page.

2. Too much animations and graphics. This will slow down the loading time of the website. People have very short tolerance towards websites that load very slowly. So they might just leave even before seeing your homepage.

3. No navigation support. You cannot expect visitors to figure out how to navigate through your site. You may find it easy to navigate, but first time visitors may not. This will cause them to abandon your site and visit other websites.

4. No standardization. The look and feel should be the same across every page. There should also be a standard link color. Usually, blue is for unopened link and red or purple is for read or opened links.

5. All pages should be connected to the home page. People may enter your site through other page other than the home page. So make sure that you always provide a link back to your home page so that they can relate to what your site is about.

6. Not enough or outdated information. Content is king when it comes to online commerce. If you want to do business online, you must have solid content. A website with outdated content will not attract visitors. You should consider adding a corporate blog to your site.

7. Horizontal scrolling bar. Most of the people don't like horizontal scrolling bar, so you should avoid using it.

8. Never test the website on various browsers. Your website may appear fine on Internet Explorer but not on Google Chrome. So make sure that your web designer tests your website for browsers compatibility.

Your website is an asset to your business so make sure that you treat it seriously. You should let your marketing guys handle the site rather than the IT people. Remember, your website is part of your overall marketing plan, not a one-off IT project.