Whether you're launching a new Web site or enhancing your current one, consider how you can improve your site and make it easier to use. The customer experience is one aspect of Web development that often gets lost somewhere between the HTML and the FTP.

Ignore the customer experience and you'll pay the price. In its report, "Why Web Sites Fail," analyst group Forester Research said that every customer who has a bad experience on a Web site tells 10 other people about it. And according to consulting firm Creative Good, you can kiss frustrated customers goodbye. In one of its e-commerce surveys, Creative Good found that 62 percent of online shoppers have given up at least once while looking for products on a Web site. And 42 percent of those shoppers actually abandoned the Internet and made their purchases through traditional retail channels.

The more you improve the overall customer experience on your Web site, the more you'll improve your order-conversion rate, the metric used to describe the rate at which Web-store visitors become paying customers.