Creating a website for your business can be challenging, there’s no doubt about it.
By Rick Manarauskis
If you’re a small business owner, you may feel overwhelmed by the volume of content production and customization necessary to bring a business website to life in vivid color.
Along the way, you may encounter several pitfalls that hold the potential to derail your website’s potential before it even has a chance to take root. Even though some of these hurdles are placed in plain view, you’ll need to strategize carefully in order to avoid their noxious effects.
Those in the process of building a business website should take special care to avoid the following 5 mistakes common to freshly-minted digital domains. With these common website creation faults in mind, you’ll be better prepared to build a website that attracts customers to your business from day one onward.
Mistake #1: Sub-par Web Hosting
Even your earliest choices while building a business website can act as a stumbling block towards long-term growth. Like building your brick-and-mortar business on ground rich in salt and sand, a sub-par web host can cause your business website to slip into a digital sinkhole from which you may never escape.
Finding a quality website hosting should be one of your top priories even before you begin “building” your website proper. You’re likely to find a glut of website hosts offering exceptionally cheap introductory prices. Though you should be on the lookout for good deals, be sure to read the fine print to ensure that you aren’t locked into a long-term contract with a portfolio of underpowered features.
In terms of features, you should always look for a web host that can certify at least 98% or greater uptime. This is usually a good indicator of how reliable that web host is. Also, you should be on the lookout for contemporary security protocols, such as TSL encryption. This should be a double priority if you intend to sell goods and transmit sensitive customer information online.
Mistake #2: Unresponsive Designs and Layouts
In the United States, 2017 saw the highest ever percentage of mobile internet-exclusive users. At nearly 40.7 million (in addition to the hundreds of thousands that use both mobile and desktop internet browsers), you’d expect nearly every website designer worth their salt to optimize their website for mobile phones. But the truth is, many first-time business website creators forget this crucial step.
Optimizing a website for mobile interfaces is not as easy as flipping a switch or ticking a box, unfortunately. You’ll need to spend extra time evaluating factors such as image placement and website navigation in order to create a website that mobile users can engage without added hassle. One of the best ways to evaluate your own work is by performing live tests on both iOS and Android phones and making adjustments accordingly.
Prior to modern innovations in root level website design, many prominent websites routed to mobile iterations of their full website when accessed through a mobile device. However, several user-friendly website building platforms today automatically format your website for mobile phones using modular content entry. You can often see what your mobile website will look like within their editing software, lessening the need for live tests.
Mistake #3: Pop Up and Advertisement Overload
Every website owner has to pay the bills, that much is universally true. When you first create your business’ website, you may need to run a few ads on your website to offset start-up and maintenance costs. Though it can be tempting to maximize profits from these ads, overloading your website with ads can slow down your website and push potential customers away.
Running ads in and of itself is not a business website building faux pas; rather, the mistake here lies in running too many ads that distract users and prevent them from even thinking about your content. In some cases, running excessive ads can even slow down customers computers, causing them to abandon the web page before it even loads.
Customers may not take this matter sitting down, either. Some may still visit your website with an ad blocker installed. While this may result in more positive engagement, you will lose out on all revenue from their website traffic. Your best option is to minimize your ads by placing them only in unobtrusive locations.
Mistake #4: Failing to Implement Useful Analytics
Some website hosts offer built-in analytic tools that help gauge factors such as daily traffic, page load times, and engagement length. Otherwise, Google Analytics is by and large the most popular data-driven suite of tools available to average website administrators today.
By inserting just a few lines of Google’s code, a business website creator is able to provide their company with a fuller picture of their website activity, including visitor behavior reports and data visualizations.
Mistake #5: Becoming Frozen in Time
Once your business website is live and in use, you shouldn’t immediately rest on your laurels. Indeed, a website that becomes frozen in time becomes as useful as a phone book from a decade ago. An outdated website tells your customers that you do not care enough to maintain it, which makes a bad first impression overall.
Whenever possible, you should strive to routinely update both the content and appearance of your website in order to give visitors a reason to return to the website. This includes updating staff listings, menus, product catalogs, and other aspects that change on a regular basis.
Updating a website can take some devoted time, though. One way some business website owners bridge the gap between major updates is by maintaining a robust social media presence. Here, updating important information is easy, allowing you the opportunity to push updated information to your core audience before placing the same updates on your main website.
Care for Your Business
All in all, there are a fair number of mistakes you can make while creating a website for your business. But even so, you can prepare for and completely avoid some of these mistakes by following the recommendations set forth in this article.
If you’ve already created your business website and sense that you’ve made some of these noteworthy mistakes, don’t panic. You can always fix these mistakes and relaunch your website with a reaffirmed commitment to providing the best digital hub for your prospective customers.
Rick Manarauskis has been a part of content marketing industry for 10 years since 2009. Working with many clients Rick has built up his experience in website hosting and website builder niches. With this experience, he is trying to convey clear information to the world on these topics. His articles tend to be data-driven and researched thoroughly to give a strong and unique point of view on every subject. He believes that using real-world examples is one of the best ways to catch readers attention. Writer by day and gamer by night, Rick likes to involve himself with the e-sports scene.
Website stock photo by Antonio Guillem/Shutterstock
