5 biggest mistakes a small business can make when creating a website.
Often at KY Designs our customers have a go at designing their own site before they resort to paying an agency like us to build the website for them and fairly often a point of analysis for us while building their new site is to look at their own attempt to help us understand what was in their head previously, here’s 5 common mistakes we see!
1. What's the purpose of the website? Do you have a plan?
You know absolutely everything there is to know about your business, but, can you explain it in as little as 50 words and an image or two? If you can’t, you need a better plan! On average, people will judge your brand and business based on their first few seconds on your homepage or landing page.
If you can’t accurately depict what you do to hook your target audience in within the first few seconds, you’ve started with a leaky bucket. Having a thorough plan about how you’re going to build the website is absolutely key. If you’re struggling to plan effectively for your website, you should take a look at our web design plans.
2. Completely forgetting about mobile responsiveness.
This is probably the most common major mistake we see from “home grown” websites. Almost no one understands that most professionally designed or developed sites have particular versions for both Desktop and Mobile alongside revisions for Tablet usage too.
With almost 50% of all search requests originating from mobile devices, if you ignore it it’s almost like ignoring 50% of customers that walk through a bricks and mortar store. We build our sites on WordPress and hide/show different elements on the page depending on which device the user is using to ensure we’re offering the best user experience to all visitors! If you’re struggling with mobile responsiveness, contact us.
3. No call to action, at all!
A call-to-action is a button or widget deliberately positioned after information to prompt the visitor to take action, if you check the bottom of this page you’ll see a fairly obvious one! People who view and interact with your website are just people at the end of the day, and people need to be led on a journey with prompts to help get the outcome your business deserves.
If you’re planning on building your own site and we can’t even tempt you to enquire with us, please make sure you give yourself the best chance of success by using these properly!
4. Navigation woes.
Something that’s often missed in translation and left to it’s own devices is navigation. Navigation is how users move through your website, normally people only simply focus on navigation within the bar at the top of the screen. Any good website designer will make use of prime navigation real estate in the footer and also ensure that the various call-to-actions at certain points take the user on a “journey” based on the topic they clicked on.
Properly navigating a site is something that we all take for granted, but when the designer isn’t focusing on the user journey it’s massively detrimental to success rates.
5. No SEO focus at all.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is another key element that’s often overlooked, which is understandable in fairness given it’s a fairly technical part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO is essentially your ranking on Google/Bing/Other search engines for the keywords that you want to be found for.
This is usually the point that most businesses go out to get a website designed by a professional, most free website builders are unable to be indexed by search engines but without focusing on SEO in the build phase makes implementing good SEM strategies incredibly difficult. Keep in mind, without any traffic you may as not have a website in the first place!