You may remember when a little less than a year ago, Google began offering free web hosting for small businesses. Google, who seem to be aiming for world domination, claimed to be all about the little guy. They may have been right in saying that small businesses needed a web presence if they were going to be able to compete with bigger players in their industries. And so Google tried to help out those mom-and-pop enterprises by offering free hosting and help with web design to the least tech-savvy business owners.

This wasn’t the beginning of a revolution, nor did it sweep up all the remaining hold outs. Small retailers and other businesses are still trickling onto the internet. And even for those who have been here for awhile, the spread of mobile internet access means that they have to continue learning how to make their web presence effective. And this all comes down to web design. Because the chances are good that small businesses also have small budgets, many of them turn to DIY web design programs. These can save you a ton of money and many provide beautifully designed templates and color schemes that mean you don’t have to be a professional designer to make your site look good. On the other hand, as with anything DIY, there’s nobody there to stop you from messing things up badly.

So before the holiday shopping begins, we thought we’d remind the small retailers out there of a few tips.

First of all, make it clear. That means that navigation should be simple and easy and each page should have a call to action making it obvious what the next step should be. Otherwise, the next step may be leaving your site. Make sure that you don’t play around with all of the web design programs layout tools at once or you’ll risk cluttering up your page. Remember the KISS system.

Otherwise, it’s all about the content, which a DIY web design program can’t help you with. The most important thing is making sure that your customers have a reason to come to your site: Whether it’s to check out the cool new products you’ve just gotten in or to read a new article in your blog. There’s only so far that web design can take you, it’s up to you to do the rest.