When putting together your business website, avoid these 10 common mistakes that can cause confusion, turn customers away, and cost you business.
1) Difficult to navigate. Whether you have a 5 page website or a 20 page website, make sure your main headings are easy to find on your landing page. Make sure they work and each one goes to the page it’s supposed to. Include links on each page that go somewhere else. For example, on each of your pages where you discuss your services, somewhere on that page link to a “Contact” page. Make sure it’s easy to navigate.
2) Incomplete website. Try not to include pages that are “Under Construction”. If there are pages that haven’t been completed yet, just don’t put a button on the front page that goes to an empty page.
3) Thin content. Photos and videos are a great way to showcase your products and services. However, websites still need content. People like to read and so do search engines. In order for search engines and people to find your website, your website needs quality content and lots of it.
4) Grammatical and spelling errors. Make sure everything is spelled correctly, grammatically correct, and makes sense. Check that the names (including the company name!) are also spelled correctly.
5) Lack of location, location, location. Be sure to include the location of your business. If you’re running a home business and don’t want to include your mailing address, at least include your city, state, and country in the footer of each page. This helps search engines and customers find you by location.
6) Lack of contact information. Be sure to include at least one, if not several, ways to contact you. A contact page is an option. A business email and business phone number are other options. Also, they should be in multiple places on your website. If they are hard to find, people will simply leave the site and you will lose the sale.
7) Difficult to read. Before you or your designer is done with the website, take a look at it and try to read it. A variety of things can make reading difficult. Sometimes font colors, background colors, and different fonts can make a website difficult to read. Customers won’t stick around to try to get through it, nor should they have to.
8) Assuming “if you build it, they will come”. Getting a website indexed by search engines and getting visitors takes a lot of time and work. Just putting it online is not the end. It’s just the beginning.
9) No analysis. Be sure to include analytics for your website so you can track visitors and know if anyone is visiting your website, how long they stay, and where they come from.
10) The website is ready. Websites are never finished. They need to be maintained, updated and adjusted. Search engines need to see that the website is being maintained. Also, if you have information on there that customers can see that is old and out of date, they will wonder if your business is still in business.
These are 10 of the most common mistakes businesses make when building a website. If you avoid these, your website should be useful and ready for business.
