For most small business owners, common marketing strategies include taking out ads in trade magazines and newspapers, buying advertising space online, or handing out fliers. Then there are the plethora of “guerilla marketing” tools that can be used to generate a buzz in the community about your product or service. But did you know that modifying the look and feel of your website can dramatically boost customer satisfaction and retention, as well as increasing the number of customers who buy after visiting your site?

According to Paul Boag of boagworld.com, it’s possible to boost website sales by as much as 10,000% with a few design and customer service changes – many of which involve improvements to the site’s visual marketing. There are a number of ways that any e-commerce website can achieve this:

• Simplify the page and get rid of any distracting clutter
• Make shopping carts more visible and easier to access
• Increase the size, clarity, and detail of images
• Make links, buttons, and actions bigger and simpler

There’s so much to think about when you’re designing the website for your online business: creating the right look and feel, making your products look good, and writing copy that sets your business apart from the millions of other eCommerce sites out there. In an effort to stand out, it can be tempting to attach clever or “cutesy” names to every component of your site, but even the most creative words and phrases can confuse potential customers and cost you sales.

Cute, Complicated, or Confusing?

Think about it this way: people who choose to purchase goods and services online are motivated by a desire for ease and convenience. They’re looking for a quick, simple shopping experience that will let them get in, get what they need, and get out—with a minimum of time, effort, and hassle. It’s just common business sense to streamline the customer’s path to your products or services; if you throw up roadblocks along the way, browsers will head to a competing website that doesn’t require so much thought.

You already know that online shoppers hate to read. With advancing Internet technologies, modern web users expect to find and process information faster than ever before. Most customers won’t spend more than a minute or two on a single web page before moving on to something else. Despite these proven facts, a surprising number of sites persist in making cute and clever mistakes that cost them customers and money.

There are literally hundreds of things to think about when launching or overhauling an eCommerce site. You’ll be faced with such decisions as which hosting provider is right for you, what graphical elements will best showcase your products or services, and how to handle inventory control and fulfillment. One vital element that often gets lost in the shuffle is site accessibility.

Many site owners stick web accessibility on a back burner for future consideration—and we all know what that usually means. While it may seem like a secondary concern, the opposite is true. Customers can be won or lost depending on how hard your site works to help people with visual disabilities, learning challenges, and speech disorders, as well as the elderly and infirm, to navigate and use your site.

For special-needs customers, such as those with a visual or hearing impairment, offering your web content in audio, video, and text formats allows them to digest the same information in the format that’s easiest for them.

In the Twitterverse last week, the fine folks at MarketingProfs talked about “confusability,” which they defined as “the direct opposite of usability in terms of web site or application design. This is achieved either intentionally or unintentionally.”

Around the same time, Blue Acorn CEO & President Kevin Eichelberger tweeted that he didn’t like Kmart’s new website. I checked out the site – talk about confusability! It looks as if someone vomited random text and pictures on the page, with no thought whatsoever about placement. The navigation wasn’t much better. Your eyes don’t know where to focus because there’s so much to focus on – and I’m just talking above the fold. Scroll down, and you’ll find even more confusability.

Now, this post isn’t going to be a case study on Kmart. Instead, I’d like to offer some strategies for avoiding confusability–many of which will seem like common sense, yet they obviously bear repeating, given the state of Kmart’s site.