10 Common Website Mistakes

1. Thinking of your website as a brochure.

It seems like it should be a good metaphor, but a website is fundamentally not the same as a brochure. Brochures are flat, linearly read objects. Websites don’t need to be flat and certainly aren’t read linearly. Thinking of your site as brochure stops you from understanding the power having your own website gives you and it can encourage you to have the wrong approach towards keeping it updated.

Brochures are designed, finalised and then printed. They become unchangeable at a certain point. Websites are never really “finished”. It’s not just that they can change, in my experience, they will change. They should change and evolve as your business evolves.

If you’re creating your website the same way you’d create a brochure – designing it page by page and planning a pixel perfect, finalised product –  then you’re thinking about it completely the wrong way.

The design of your site should be a malleable framework that your content will fit into, even if you change that content (which you will). If you get that framework right from the outset, then your site maintenance will be much easier and your website will be able to evolve with your changing business needs.

2. Focusing too much on what it looks like and too little on content.

A beautiful design is useless if you’re not saying something that people want to read.

There are some sites that are all about how they look and having the flashiest of flashy gizmos. Most small business sites aren’t about that. They’re about compelling content that sells the individual or the business as competent experts in their field.

Even if your business is something that sounds initially simple, like dog walking, you need to present yourself as a competent, trustworthy person and having more content than just your contact details and a few paragraphs will help you stand out from the crowd more than a nice design will.

3. Not enough content.

Leading on from that, you may have been told that you need to be concise on your site and put everything in bullet points. You may have been told that people don’t read long pages.

This is not strictly true.

People do read long pages… if you’ve managed to catch their attention and you’re saying something that they want to read more about. Google also loves content, and not just in blogs. If it’s relevant to have a lot of content, then put in lots of content.

There’s a caveat, of course. The advice on being concise isn’t completely wrong. If you’re going to say a lot on your site, then your design needs to flatter that fact and make people want to read it.  Make it easy on the eye. You want pull quotes and calls to action. You want infographics. You want summaries and tables. If you want to follow the advice of having short concise pages, then have a lot of them and link between them clearly and cleverly. Your lengthy content can be designed and presented to, not look overwhelming, but lead a user deeper into the information you’re giving them.

4. Focusing too little on the design.

Your page design tells people things about you and your business. If it’s bland and generic, then it’s saying you’re not interesting enough to bother reading about. If the colours are all over the place, your logo looks squeezed or the fonts are all mismatched, it says that you’re a bit sloppy. People are used to a level of sophistication in their websites these days. Your design doesn’t need to be bold, original and breath-taking but simple little design touches and consistency of style will make your site look more professional and trustworthy to your customers.

Steve Jobs famously said “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Design also isn’t just about the colour scheme or the images. How do you want people to move through your site? What do you want them to do when they arrive at your home page? Which page should they go to next? How do you get their attention and make them do what you want? How does your site serve their needs.

That’s design too.

5. Not thinking about your navigation menus enough.

There are many mistakes people make with the design of the navigation menus. By design here, I mean the words you choose to put on the buttons and the drop downs.

Some of the mistakes that companies make include laying out the menus according to structure of the company’s organisation chart, using keywords that mean something to them but aren’t necessarily helpful to their customers in finding out what they’re about, and using what we call “mystery meat” navigation, where you have no idea where the link might take you based on what it says or looks like!

When thinking about menus, put yourself into your customer’s shoes. If you were coming to your site to buy your product or service, what words would you want to see in the menus? What words would make you click on them for more information? Now, assume that the customer is coming to you, as an expert, because they don’t understand the subject area at all. Are your menus still helpful to guiding them deeper into your site and choosing you?

6. Big pointless graphics.

If you’re going to devote a large part of your homepage to a picture, it should have a point. It should have useful words, or be a link, or even have multiple links. A good-looking image isn’t good enough if it’s on your homepage doing nothing apart from sitting there. If you really like the image and believe that it’s important to your business to have that image on the site prominently, then it should be incorporated into the overall page design in some fashion.

Big pointless graphics sit there taking up space on the page that could be used better. They often push the important words that you want people to be reading down the page, off the screen, out of sight, they use up your web hosting bandwidth allowance for no good reason and most people will scroll straight past them anyway.

7. Not having a joined-up marketing strategy.

So, instead of thinking of your website as your brochure, what should you think of it as? It’s your marketing hub. It’s your “home” page. It’s your “shop”, even if you’re not using e-commerce. It’s your virtual “office” that people come to visit to find out more about you and to interact with you.

Every other piece of marketing material you produce has a word limit and limited space to put your message into, but your website doesn’t. Your website is the one place you can say as much as you want and make into whatever you want.

Everything you do, online and offline, should be tying back into your website.

At the most basic level, a joined-up strategy means making sure your website matches your other marketing materials. That includes your business cards, leaflets, signage, etc but also social media presence. Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter all allow you some customisation of your pages to reflect your branding.

People often seem to treat social media as something separate from their website. You see sites with basic links off to social pages. Why are you sending people away from your site over to someone else’s? Your social media presence should be integrated into your own site. Share buttons can be easily integrated, even on static websites. And, of course, not all of your customers will have Twitter or Facebook.

If you’re putting the good stuff onto those social sites, don’t exclude people from the party for not wanting to access the content that way. If they are using those sites, keep giving people reasons to go back to your site, that’s where the meat of your business offering should be. Remember, you want to increase your site hits, not Facebook’s.

8. Not planning for the future.

How you manage the inevitable process of maintenance and change is very important. If you don’t plan for it, and those changes become ad hoc, your initially nicely designed site can easily end up looking scruffy and unprofessional.

The primary user of your website is you. Whether you have a web designer who’s maintaining it for you or you’re managing it yourself through a CMS, the process of updating it needs to work for you. It should be easy, quick and flexible.

9. Worrying too much about SEO.

The key to Search Engine Optimisation is to be relevant to what people are searching for.

You can spend a lot of money buying Adwords on Google – the cost can escalate at a frightening pace – but if those visitors are not finding the information they’re looking for on your site then they’re going to bounce right back to Google again… and you’ll be charged for the click through, with no resulting sale to pay for it.

If your content is relevant and plentiful (and your Google sitemap is up to date) then, when someone searches for your keywords, your site will come up because you will be hitting those keywords naturally in your content.

SEO is something your web designer should be worrying about more than you. Good SEO starts in the code behind the web page and there are things which should be done as a matter of course.

I’m not saying don’t buy paid ads. Just buy the right ones for your business. Google Adwords should be used as a specific campaign with measurable results, not done scattershot. I’m not saying don’t do link building activities, such as writing guest blogs on other people’s sites, but make it natural and relevant.

Stop worrying so much about SEO in general, and start writing good content. If you write it, they will come.

10. Not thinking about your audience.

This is the number one biggest error. It’s an easy trap to fall into. You’re busy thinking about your business as you plan what you want to put on there. You’re trying to sell yourself. So you’re thinking about who you are and what you can do. So that’s what you put on there.

But what does your ideal customer want or need to see? How experienced are they with your subject? Are they young or old? Are they other businesses, or individuals? Will they understand the jargon that you’re using? What are you saying that will make them trust and choose you?

This won’t just affect the content of the site, it will affect the design. If your ideal customers are old, then you may want a larger type face or the ability to change the text size. Certain colours or images may appeal more than others.

Everyone says you should be using social media but, if your ideal customer isn’t the sort of person that uses social media or isn’t likely to be using a particular social site, then you simply won’t find them by promoting yourself there and you’re wasting time you could spend on something else in your business. You could invest more in real world marketing or go out networking to promote your business (and send them to your site).

In the end, a website that is good for your customers is good for you.