A good user experience is the same as good customer service. It's fundamental to the success of your business. You need to ensure your site is treating your customers well, just as you would expect of any other representative of the company. In this article, we'll consider several ways to uncover problems that your site visitors encounter, as well as approaches to fixing these issues.

I recently told a friend about some ideas I heard during a brief website design seminar. He commented that it seemed like really elementary stuff. Indeed, it was. But the elementary stuff needs restating from time to time. It's important to address basic issues before getting carried away playing with slick new features or major redesigns. The fact of the matter is that many sites don't have the basics down -- and it could be costing them business.

A brick-and-mortar business is a good analog for a website. No business has unlimited time or resources, so it's important to triage and prioritize problems that are affecting your reputation, growth, and bottom line. If the front door sticks in a manner that causes potential customers to think you are closed, or a store aisle is blocked by a stack of boxes, you have no business picking out trendy new paint colors for the storeroom walls. You should get after fixing the front door and moving the boxes.

So while it's great fun to take on big, dramatic changes, take a little time first to handle simple issues that make such a big difference to your customers. Even if you have a major site update planned, taking these steps now will help you discover how your new site can better serve your customers, and therefore your business. And the habits you adopt for continuous improvement will serve you well now, and will flow right into any new design as well.

So let's look at ways you can go about finding the problems, as well as six guidelines for fixing them.