Gluttony
Gluttony is the overindulgence of anything to the point of waste and is often used in the context of eating. Although web businesses may not have an eating disorder, they often become gluttons of content. All too often, websites feature too much stuff -- a cluttered design, too many links or a layout that looks like it was designed by committee.

Every page on your website should have a goal -- a purpose. If you can't clearly articulate that purpose, then maybe you shouldn't have that page. Crowded sites usually distract visitors from getting to that goal, which may be reading the most important information, clicking on the essential link, registering for the email newsletter, buying your product and so on.

In most cases, less is more. Identify the most important value statements, and then layer additional content so that visitors who want extra information can click to access. Time and time again, multivariable experiments have demonstrated that reducing the amount of copy, reducing the number of required forms in a field or just generally de-cluttering a site can improve conversion rates.

Envy
Envy is about wanting what others have. In business, this often translates to the temptation to imitate other companies, including competitors. Certainly, there may be sites that you admire, and online design and marketing practitioners should always seek out best practices. However, you need to resist the urge to copy or use similar design principles or incorporate every cool new widget that others are employing. Trying new ideas is always good and should be encouraged, but remember the fundamentals:

• Who are your visitors?
• What are they looking for?
• What content and technology helps them walk down a certain path?

Not all companies need to be on the bleeding edge. In fact, we've seen instances where companies have added Web 2.0 functionality, only to see their conversion rates actually drop after implementation.

It is best to keep in mind that what works for other companies, including your competitors, may not work for your audience. Very often, winning designs and elements are counterintuitive. For example, my company worked with an online retailer that insisted that its order buttons be a certain color -- not because of branding reasons, but because of assumed best practices. The company thought green would be the best color because "green means go, and red means stop." Well, through an optimization experiment, we indeed learned that the red button actually performed better and increased conversions.