6 Website Mistakes To Avoid
We see a lot of website blunders – it’s often when our clients first come to us for help. Here are 6 classic clangers you should avoid with your site…
1. Inflexible or difficult admin experience
A website needs to grow and change, so you most likely will need to be able to make changes quickly and cost-effectively. We’re not talking about tweaking a word here or there but making new pages with new layouts, changing menus, etc. Whether your web team does this or you do it yourself, it needs to work to support making fast iterations and changes without touching too many lines of code.
2. Locked-in
When your web developer uses a proprietary or “special” content management system, you need to be sure that you want to get into a long-term relationship with them. Many people find out after it’s too late that they can’t move their site elsewhere when their web guy goes AWOL or wants to charge a motza to make changes.
3. “Meh” first impressions
As they say, you don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. Sites that leave your visitors feeling like they don’t connect with who is behind it, or that it’s outdated, stale, boring or clunky can make your organisation look the same by association. Your site must be useful, usable and engaging to be worthy of your brand.
4. Search impaired
There’s a lot that can make your site harder to find in search. If it’s slow, not mobile-friendly, technically sloppy or lacking in relevant content, it won’t be helping you win business on page 4 of the search results. There’s a science to getting sites to rank and it takes careful planning and hard work, but it’s absolutely worth the investment to be pulling in leads from page 1 results month on month.
5. Poor web hosting
It’s that unseen foundation of every website that most people take for granted. But good web hosting that is fast, secure and modern will not only make your site more enjoyable to administer and browse but it’ll boost your search rankings too.
6. Too much entropy
Like an old toothbrush, sites that are updated by non-designers tend to degrade over time and start looking a bit frayed around the edges. A little banner here, a crappy photo there, an SEO textwall over here… eventually the site doesn’t look right and it’s a long way back to what it was intended to be. There’s no great answer to this, you need to make changes over time. But know when it’s time for a new toothbrush!
