Imagine if you could shortcut the time it took for your website to go from good to great. You’d be on your way to reaching more customers and sales, or building your successful online business faster.
The best way to cut your learning time is to learn from other people’s mistakes. In this article, we’ll look at the top 10 mistakes that rookies make when creating their website.
1. Believing people care about you and your web site
Have you ever been on a bad date where your partner talks too much? He tells you about the intricacies of insurance policies and statistical significance and cumulative distributions… *snore*. And he wonders why he never gets any action.
When you’re out on a date, you shouldn’t talk about yourself all the time. Your date doesn’t really care all that much about you. Sad, but true. If you really want to impress your date, make the whole date about her. Not you.
Rookies who fall into this trap create a website that’s all me me me not realizing that visitors couldn’t care less. Make it easy to find what they are looking for, and your visitors will love you for it. We cover this in detail in our article: Website Goals Made Simple
2. Not knowing the true cost of a website
Another mistake that leads to website delays and sub-par websites is underestimating how much a website will cost in terms of money and time commitment. Creating a website actually takes a significant investment of your time, in addition to the financial cost.
This is true even if you hire web professionals to build the site for you because you need to spend time planning, identifying your website goals, etc before you can provide a proper brief. Failing to do so will result in a half-baked website.
Overestimating a website’s cost and non-essential features can also lead to delays and project derailments. Learn how to properly budget for your website in our article: How Much Will It Cost? Budgeting for Your First Website
3. Leaving someone else to take care of your website
The growing importance of the web makes websites a critical sales and marketing channel for any business. That’s why the business owner should play an active role in managing the website.
Leaving a freelancer or web design company in charge of your website is like giving them the keys to your store or office. This mistake can cause problems when you can’t get hold of the freelancer to make site updates, or put you in a situation where you are nickel-and-dimed by your web designer at every opportunity.
4. Website updates are too difficult or expensive
Closely related to the previous mistake is creating a website that is too difficult or expensive to update. Rookies who make this mistake will soon find that their website is a white elephant that soon becomes outdated.
To avoid this mistake, create your site with a simple-to-use content management system, or CMS. Be sure to get your web designer to show you how their proposed CMS works so that you can gauge how simple it is to use before agreeing to it.
Personally I recommend WordPress, which is the software behind the scenes at The ClickStarter. WordPress is open source software, meaning that it costs nothing to use. It’s an extremely popular publishing platform, and there are lots of web professionals who can create your website with WordPress.
5. Failing to plan for website content
Talking about content, failing to plan for the website’s content is another common rookie mistake. Rookies approach a website’s content with a cut-and-paste formula: Home page, About, Products and Contact. This approach creates placeholders which is later filled with marketing-speak, brochure content.
The correct way to go about planning for website content is to understand the role and goals of each page. Then, we strategically include relevant elements for each page. Finally we employ copywriting techniques and images to make the content compelling for the visitors.
6. Going (too far) against design conventions
One of the ways that rookies try to make their website stand out from the crowd is to incorporate a radical design that is different from traditional websites. Unfortunately this can easily backfire and cause visitors to feel lost and leave.
Web users form their expectations for your site based on what’s commonly done on most other sites. So if you go against design conventions, you confuse visitors and break the consistency of their experience. Wanting to stand out is great, but never at the expense of user experience.
7. Features that obstruct visitors
Imagine that you’ve decided to have lunch at a new restaurant. As you’re about to step in the waiter stops you and says, “Wait, I need to tell you about today’s specials first.” You’re then subjected to the waiter’s monologue before he lets you in. Nuh-uh, skipping is not an option.
Ridiculous isn’t it? But that’s what many websites do when they show visitors a Flash intro page. These intro pages annoy the visitor and obstruct them from entering your website. Other features that obstruct visitors include lengthy registration forms, posting content as PDF files and pop-up windows.
Mistakes like these are a result of being self-centered and not customer-focused. Understand that website visitors have goals of their own and meet them in the middle.
8. Not understanding the basics of website technology
Here’s another restaurant analogy: Imagine that you’re the owner and chef of a restaurant. You love to cook, and you’re happiest in the kitchen. But as the owner, you’ve also got to learn how to deal with inventory, manage your staff and everything else that comes with running a restaurant.
It’s the same thing for websites. It’s not your main job, but you need to know the basic operation and how it works. At the very least you should know how to edit your website, add new content and make backups. It’s also a good idea to have some knowledge of web marketing techniques like social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO).
There’s a wealth of information on almost any topic freely available on the web. Go to Google.com and search for “topic name beginners guide” to find resources about the basics of website technology.
9. Forgetting about marketing
Build it and they will NOT come.
Creating a website and getting visitors and traffic are not the same thing. Your job is not done once your website goes live. Your website is only useful if there are people visiting and ultimately buying.
Driving serious traffic to your website requires quite a bit of work. Be prepared to set aside a few hours each month to promote your website. We will be covering marketing and attracting customers in upcoming week so be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed or mailing list.
10. Worrying too much about SEO
Search engines like Google have gotten so good at what they do that brand new websites will show up in the search results for the relevant keywords within 1-2 weeks. As long as you’re using a modern CMS like WordPress, or your web designer has included SEO in your website proposal, you shouldn’t have to worry too much about it.
The problem is that many rookies mistakenly believe that SEO is a magic bullet for getting instant website traffic. In reality, SEO is not a traffic generation technique and requires significant time and effort to result in good search rankings.
If the goal is to generate traffic to a website, there are other faster and more effective ways of doing so. Engaging through social media like Twitter and Facebook, or writing articles to popular blogs and websites are examples of proven traffic generation tactics.
Bonus mistake: Not launching sooner
Here’s another one for good measure. Many businesses and entrepreneurs delay and put off their website for far too long. There are many excuses for this including not having the money and not knowing how. In other cases the rookie is still planning or still tweaking so that the website is perfect and ready to launch.
Don’t wait till your website is perfect before launching–it’ll never reach perfect. And you’re not MegaBrand Inc, you’re the scrappy entrepreneur or solo business owner–you can’t afford to wait for perfect. Launch the site once you’ve reached 85%. You’ll learn from your mistakes and improve it along the way.
We’re living in the internet age and I would argue that a website is more important than a business card for some of us. Your website is the representation of your business on the web. If your website is not yet online, you’re not open for business on the web. So get that website out the door, and tweak it along the way.
Next Actions
- Set a deadline for your website launch. Above all else, delaying your website is the biggest mistake you can make.
- Learn up about basic web technologies, especially the ones you know that you don’t know.
- If you have a question in your head right now, ask it in the comments below. I’ll do my best to answer!
Have a question? Ask your question in the comments. Click here to read the rest of the Website ClickStart: Simplifying the Steps to Creating Your First Website series.
Photo credit: Alex Proimos & iStockphoto
The ClickStarter 