6 Common Mistakes People Make When Starting a Business Do yourself a favor and avoid these costly pitfalls.

Like every startup entrepreneur, Rodney Nelson needed a great website. Woolly Pocket, the company he was building with his brother, Miguel, aimed to sell its cleverly designed, eco-friendly wall planters online. But there were problems.

"Our first site didn't follow the standard design protocol of a good website," remembers Nelson, who is also a business-management consultant in Phoenix. "It was difficult to navigate; customers had to scroll all the way to the bottom of the homepage and then to the next page to find 'buy it now.'"

The brothers moved on to another developer, but their second e-commerce site didn't work well either, and they found it hard to get the tech team to respond quickly. "I think we paid under $7,000, but we had to redo it maybe six months later," Nelson says. "The second time it cost $15,000; we were happier with it, but we weren't ecstatic. Then we went to another company about a year later. We did three websites in one year. In the end, we'd done four websites in one and a half years before we got one that worked."