5 Website Mistakes Many Businesses Still Make

1. Having no clear purpose.

What is the purpose of your website? Is it there to sell? To build credibility? To generate leads? Is it converting leads into sales? Is it mainly targeted at the new customers or is it there to keep existing customers engaged?

We came across many businesses who said they have a website because it is a must have of the modern world. They think of it simply as a business card of the digital space. However, without a clear purpose and strategy, websites cannot be designed to do their job.

Your website strategy needs to fit with your overall business strategy and have your target market at the front of mind every step of the way. Who is landing on your web pages, what are they looking for, what problem do you appeal to from the moment they enter and how do you propose you solve that problem. Is there a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) on your homepage, a call to action?

Remember also that your visitors may be at different stages in the buying or decision making process. How does your website appeal to each? Having clear buying personas down on paper with their needs and problems outlined is the important step in designing or updating your website that many bypass.

2. Too much ‘About You’.

While our parents taught us that it’s not polite to always talk about ourselves, as business owners, we often forget that rule. Don’t get me wrong, having ‘About’ page on your website is important but even that page should be less ‘about us’ and more ‘about them’. What can you help with is much more important information to the visitor than the clichéd marketing terms like ‘over 100 years combined experience’ or ‘family owned and operated’. So again, have those buying personas in mind when working on every single landing page of your site.

3. A design based on a pretty example.

Looking at good website designs for inspiration is a great starting point. Your website must look good and professional. However, the type of business you are in (B2C/B2B), your industry, your target market, your service area (geographic location) and of course your purpose (!) are only some of the other key things to consider.

For example, B2C websites are generally known for their shorter and catchier content pieces, while B2B websites may contain more comprehensive material such as in depth technical white papers, webinar recordings, explanatory videos and more, as they cater for a much more complex decision making process than B2C websites.

An e-commerce website design practices, for example, focus a lot on impulse buying. They deal directly with the end user and need to sell, sell and sell. For a services business, however, a website serves more of a middle-man purpose. It exists to generate leads, to gain interest and to prompt initial contact with potential buyer.

4. Clutter.

Too many messages, too many words, no visuals or too many, are all non user-friendly practices for a website design.

Image sliders is another thing that many digital marketers warn against, but this is often a major point of disagreements between them and the business owners who want to showcase as much of their work as possible.

Many marketers still disagree among themselves whether image sliders or carousels are a good idea. So we suggest that a case-by-case approach is taken here.

5. Thinking that investment into traffic building (e.g. via SEO, PPC and Social Media) is all you need to increase sales.

A website is no use if it has no traffic. Agree? But spending money on building traffic can be a waste if the website is not continuing to do the job of selling (or whatever its purpose!) on the other end. Everything has to work together to get you more enquiries and more business.

And here is a bonus one: Your website speed matters! If you’re too slow, you’ll lose them.

Have any questions in regards to your website? Contact us.