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Top 10 common business website mistakes – with practical solutions. Part 1

Mark Tomkins
By Mark Tomkins
3rd November 2015

1. Cheap or free website hosting – avoid it like the plague.

As a business, you know the importance of a website and that it is a crucial part of your branding and marketing image – both for the long-term but also individual campaigns. It is vital that time and effort is invested (yes, invested) into the messaging and image of your website – it represents you and your business when you can’t be there to explain it, so it has to be right.

As you would expect, we get involved with businesses at all stages and see their web presence change and grow.

Here are the top ten common mistakes businesses make with their website image and messaging that you should avoid along with the solutions we recommend. For ease we’ve split this into three key sections:

FOUNDATIONS AND THE BUILD
EVERYTHING GOOGLE & SEARCH RELATED
AFTER THE BUILD, WHAT NEXT?

 

Over the next few weeks we’ll publish each part in a bite-sized article so that it’s easier to take in and not one, large document that makes you sigh after 10 minutes of reading.

Part 1 will cover an important aspect of the foundation and build of your website: Cheap or free website hosting.

1. Cheap or free website hosting – avoid it like the plague.

There is no such thing as a free lunch – you get what you pay for – pick your phrase. Cheap or free website hosting will not give you the tools or level of support you need. Your business is reliant on its website and, even more-so, your email and yet so many people take the attitude of not wanting to pay much or anything at all for one of their key business requirements. Most businesses try and get away with paying less for their email hosting than the amount they spend on coffee for the office in a year.

Cheap or free hosting is very often on a large shared server (your website and domain on one big system along with thousands of others) and the IP address of the server will be listed on lots of global spam databases – giving you no-end of email problems. They will also provide email-only support when things go wrong or your call gets answered from abroad where you have to explain a problem over and over. You’ll also find that for every little extra feature you need (SQL database, stats, more email accounts etc) you’ll have to pay more – so it’s not cheap in the long run.

 

The solution

Invest in good web hosting with a local provider who owns their own web servers in a data centre – they will be able to provide you with better support when your emails or website have problems and are more likely to have a better server speed.  Google prefers servers that are faster. Fact.

 

 

Next time…

The part 2 of our Top 10 Common Business Website Mistakes (with solutions!) will cover Bad Website Design and Layout – it’s all in the user experience!