Building a website for your small business can be extremely difficult, especially if it is your first attempt and you are working on a tight budget. This article highlights ten of the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.
Unclear objectives: It is a bad idea to set up a website simply because ‘everyone else has one’. You should be clear on the purpose of the website and the functions it will provide. For example, your primary objective may be to increase sales or to provide an additional level of support and once you are certain about this then you can design your website accordingly to assist this function.
Cheap domain name: It is tempting to save money by going for a cheap or free hosting package, but ultimately it will prove pointless because no-one will be able to find your website and it will be hard for you and your customers to remember it.
Gimmicks: Flashing images and animations may look cool but ultimately they only distract your business clients from the actual message.
Design-heavy: Don’t spread your message out across a large number of pages just because it looks pretty. Visitors will soon give up and go elsewhere if they cannot get the information they need quickly. You may find it easiest to use a pre-built website template like the one’s found in OnlineOffice instead of making the design over-complicated.
Poor navigation: It is easy to spend so much time working on your website that you lose sight of how difficult it has become to for new visitors to use. Try to have a navigation bar on each page and also have one page which is an overall Site Map. Make sure you test your website on someone who has never been there before to see how they manage.
Forgetting contact details: This may seem absurd, but it is actually quite easy to write wonderful content for your website in your word processing software and then forget to include any contact details
Scanning your brochure: Although you may have spent a lot of money developing a high-quality brochure, simply scanning the pages and posting them online would be inappropriate because a website is a totally different medium to print.
Large graphics: Broadband uptake has made this less of an issue in recent years, but graphically intensive sites will still not load instantly. Also, around 10% of Internet users in the US are still on dial-up connections.
Disconnected from offline image: There is little point in designing a flashy website that has no relation to your business outside of the web. You should make sure it is consistent with your existing offline branding.
Nobody knows that you exist: Don’t forget to let everyone know about your new website once it is finished. Put your address on everything i.e. business cards, packaging, e-mail signature, advertising. The next step is then to begin search engine optimisation to try and drive traffic towards your site.
