The Nielsen Norman Group — a well-known group of usability experts — is kindly offering a free download of their report titled “Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities.”

You’d normally drop $124 on this report, which details 75 best practices for designing web sites for those with disabilities.

In my opinion, every web site should be designed and coded with accessibility as a consideration. This report will give you the fundamentals and you’ll be able to figure out how your site stacks up. Business owners, download a copy and send it to your designer as their holiday gift.

It’s interesting to me that even sites that should be effective at e-commerce instead succeed at frustrating customers.

Case in point: I clicked over to the eTail 2008 web site last week to look at the agenda to see if I might want to attend. After browsing the site, I saw an advertisement selling the eTail 2007 conference audio presentations.

Interesting, I thought. I can listen to this past year’s conference in the comfort of my home or office. The advertisement led me to this page.

The page asked for my credit card information but made absolutely no mention of a) how much it costs, or b) what I get for my money. Also, the page said to “Complete this form to register for the webcast.” My expectation was that I would receive audio, which usually comes in the form of downloadable MP3s, not a webcast. There was also no mention of if my purchase would allow me to download the presentations to my iPod or if the presentations can only be accessed once online (a “webcast” is typically a streaming file viewed or heard online).

Due to the poorly conceived page, I immediately bailed to try to find that information elsewhere (unsuccessfully).

There’s a lesson in this experience. When selling something, clearly let customers know how much something costs before asking for their payment information. Additionally, you should briefly let them know what they are getting for their money. In the example above, the eTail conference folks might want to set my expectations of the price and product before asking for payment information.

Setting customers expectations before asking for their payment information is not only a best practice, but a way to reduce customer complaints when they don’t get what they expected.

Showing holiday shipping cutoff dates on your web site makes sense for many reasons. First, it sets the customer’s delivery expectation. Second of all, it will reduce the number of calls you’ll get asking if an order will be delivered by the holidays.

You should show this information in 2 places — the homepage and in checkout. I typically favor a rather prominent link on the homepage to a dedicated page that discusses holiday shipping. In checkout, you’ll want some messaging saying something like “Order by December xx to ensure holiday delivery.”

One thing we do effectively on the Virginia Favorites site is to list the estimated shipping date on every product page. This, combined with the holiday shipping information that lists cutoff dates, helps the customer determine if their order will arrive in time.

Before traffic starts to spike for the holidays, audit your paid search program (Google Adwords, etc.) for bids, new keyword combinations, and ad copy. You may want to create multiple ads for each ad group so you can quickly see which ad performs better. Also, make sure each of your ads click to a relevant page on your site.

For example, if you are bidding on “buy widgets,” make sure your ad headline has “buy widgets” in it and the ad, when clicked, goes directly to a page on your site that sells widgets. The homepage of your site is often not the best destination for a paid search engine ad.

It’s common convention for customers to register in order to check out, but many customers want to skip that step. While this may involve some IT involvement to make it happen, you can always ask the customer to save their information in an account after the purchase has been made.

If you must require customers to register, make sure they know the benefits of doing so, such as the ability to see order history, track orders as they ship, save shipping addresses, etc. When putting messaging on the screen to this effect, be succinct but descriptive.

Shipping costs are a barrier to online shopping, so offering free shipping can be a great way to increase sales if it doesn’t significantly erode your profits. Sometimes, sites offer “free shipping on orders over $x” to prevent significant profit erosion. You may also choose to offer this only to e-mail subscribers, best customers or promote this for a short period of time (one day, for example).

My clients have had good success with exclusive free shipping offers as well as “free shipping on orders over $x.” If you opt for “free shipping on orders over $x,” find an appropriate dollar cutoff by finding out what your site’s average order size is, then increase it by a small amount.