Website Creation

Back

What Are The Most Common Mistakes People Make When They
 Create Small Business Websites?

Make average download times exceed 10 second. Let’s say you’ve just opened an attractive new retail store. It’s stocked with the classiest merchandise and staffed by helpful, eager salespeople. Yet, you only allow customers to enter through the second floor window. Will it succeed? Of course not. You’re making it too hard for the customer to enter the store. Yet far too many web sites greet their visitors with huge graphic files or flash animation on their home pages. Visitors to your web site are like everyone else in the world today - time-starved. It's foolish to presume your web site visitors will stick around any longer than 10 seconds.

Put up the site, then leave it alone. When I worked at a pharmacy during high school, the owner made us dust shelves and tidy up merchandise. Being a know-it-all youth, I thought this stuff was boring and didn’t see how it would benefit a business. Now that I’m older, I see that I was wrong. Keeping a store’s interior clean provides visitors with a more memorable experience. The same holds true for a small business' web site. Tidy up your web site content by loading new content and updating copy sections every 6 months at the least. The aim is to lure the infrequent visitor back for another peek. And that won’t happen with dusty shelves.

Hide your ‘pearls’ deep within.. Visitors to your site, especially new ones, want to find the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible. Keep your most important content at least two clicks away from your home page. Any deeper than this and they will get overlooked, both by visitors and the search engines.

Don’t include a search box for the site. According to Jakob Nielsen, 50% of all web site visitors are search-dominant. This means they arrive at a web site fully expecting to use a search box to find what they are looking for at the site. If your site has a fair amount of content, you should provide a search box that’s above the fold (viewable without any scrolling), easy to find (the upper left hand corner is the most common placement for the search box) and comprehensive in its results.

—Jay Lipe is president of Emerge Marketing.
 

1) The biggest mistake is not defining your objective for the web site. Web sites come in different flavors: brochure-ware, resource, lead generation, e-commerce, and portal. You have to put in the right ingredients to make it just right. Ingredients include message, design, branding, technologies, capabilities, and marketing mix. If you don’t include the right ingredients, you won’t achieve you objective. If you don’t define your objective, you’re just wasting time and money.

2) The second biggest mistake is not updating your web site regularly. A web site is a reflection of your business. If you’re web site is reflecting your business from two years ago, it’s doing you more harm than good. Hire someone to keep your web site updated… it should only cost $50-$100/month to keep the site up to date. Think of this as an investment in your business and image.

3) The third biggest mistake is that companies don’t leverage their web sites. Direct people to your web site in all your marketing campaigns and in all your interaction with clients and prospects. Put your white papers, data sheets, forms, and downloads online. Make it informative and useful for clients and prospects. Tie your web site with marketing campaigns… people will go to your web site before they call you. Encourage people to contact you.

—Salim Lakhani, CEO, Initsoft Web Solutions.
 

1. Avoid the “Me, too” Syndrome. Many small businesses focus on adding the fancy bells and whistles that they see on other sites to their own. Not only does this add unnecessary functionality, it will not increase sales or bring a return on their investment. The beauty of the Web is that when sites are developed correctly, they are scalable. This means that a proper site can be developed
in phases. Start with the basics, and as you get feedback from potential clients or stakeholders, make the recommended additions or changes.

2. There’s no such thing as a $500 Web site. Many small businesses don’t understand the value of hiring an expert in usability and design to create and develop their Web site. Thus, they hire novice designers or engineers to deliver. In 95% of these cases, I find that either the company hired did not deliver, or that the client is unhappy with the look of the site. This is a waste of time and money, as the site needs to be redesigned to enhance the look, usability and create brand recognition.

3. If you build it, they will not come. Not automatically, that is. You must focus on search engine submissions, optimization and other ecommerce strategies to bring customers to your site. Millions of sites are added to the Internet daily. What makes yours stand apart? First, it should be easy to find. You can accomplish this through grass roots strategies such as cross linking arrangements, and through creating relevant content with appropriate search strings so that Web crawlers can find you. Second, once visitors see your Home Page, you MUST clearly and succinctly deliver a solution to their problem. Forget that trendy “Enter Here” stuff. Get to the point. People are compressed for time and they will appreciate your fast answers to their challenges.

—Les Kollegian, Owner and Founder, Jacob Tyler Creative Group