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According to a recent Forrester study, 79% of all companies with a website channel fail to make their page text legible–either because of font size or type, background color, competing graphics or what have you. That failure leads to a significantly higher customer abandon rate.

Another common problem with websites is security. The highest drop-out rate comes on the forms page where customers are asked to give private information but the page itself offers no indication of security measures or a link to the company’s privacy policy. This is surprising since the hot issue of customer security concerns has been around for about 12 years, or as long as mass quantities of people have been buying books online.

Other issues include backbuttons that don’t navigate back to where you were or don’t go back at all, shopping carts that don’t hang onto what you’ve put in them for more than a nano second, self-help information that is hidden away or split off into complex trees and branches that customers will not take the time to learn (and why should they?), navigation that isn’t intuitive but instead requires the customer to think–recall Steve Krug’s standard: Don’t Make Me Think.

It’s sort of amazing. You would think that companies would have solved these issues by now, but it appears to be a continual learning curve.

One important practice any company can put in place immediately is to have multiple groups participating in the creation of the site or the feature from the perspective of the customer. The Marketing department perceives and knows the customer from a different perspective than the Operations department–but they both know the customer. To use your site as if you were the customer will shed important and new critical light on how things work.

It seems a no-brainer, but programmers and developers view the world differently. They’re focused on the tools and scripts necessary to take the site live; sure they want the site to work, and they want it to work well, but in the course of building it, they often lose the ability to see it with the same new eyes as your customer.

It’s the customer, silly. Web site design that really works for the customer will likely be the differentiator between a successful web channel and a failed one.