Business Empire Magazine provides how to's and articles for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs

When businesses are in the midst of designing or modifying their websites, they tend to put a lot of effort into these areas: gathering site requirements, designing the site and building the site.

But they all too often forget or ignore the last stage of launching a new website (or launching a major redesign) - the evaluation or testing of the site by real consumers or, at the very least, by an website usability expert. The interesting thing about this is that this step is typically the least expensive stage of building a website yet it can have the greatest impact on the success of your business.

In a perfect world the design would actually be evaluated and tested prior to being launched so that any errors in the code, and thus the functioning of the website, would be found. As importantly, aspects of the site that visitors don't understand, don't like, or plain just 'doesn't work' would be identified and fixed prior to going live. These situations can result in 1) a high bounce rate, and 2) negative impression amongst your target consumer, both leading to lower sales or whatever other conversions you had in mind with your website (sign up for a newsletter, click for more information, etc).

But the reality is that most businesses are usually so crunched for time and budget that they do not account for this in their website deployment timeline. In that case, the next best thing is to have the site evaluated by a usability consultant and/or test the site immediately after going live. Both are recommended, and testing by real target-market consumers is the preference, although it is far more expensive than a review by a usability expert. So if time and budget are a great concern, at least have a usability consultant evaluate the site against website usability norms and best practices. This expert should readily be able to tell you where potential (or existing) problems exist and how to correct them. And as surprising as it may seem, many of these can be fixed immediately for they can be as simple as changing labels of categories so that they are meaningful to the consumer, not to those that operate the business.