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Top 10 common business website mistakes – with practical solutions. Part 3

Bekki Tomkins

3. Slow down – build a website quickly, build it twice.

 

Following in our series of short blog posts covering the top 10 most common mistakes business website owners make – with practical solutions – we address the top of how quickly people expect to have their new website live.

Everyone wants their website ‘live as soon as possible’. They’ve made the decision to have a new website and then it’s all-consuming to them and they want it now-now-NOW!

Stop.

Would you build your house as quickly as possible? No. You’d build it properly – do the same with your website.

The foundations are important. Get it wrong and you won’t get from it what you want and more importantly, your website visitors will have bad experience and that would be bad:

The solution

1. Set a clear goal as to what you want from the site in the first year.

2. Write it down in a brief or some sort of document. If you really have no idea, ask your developer to send you their ‘briefing questionnaire’. A good one will have one. We do. You can see our web project questionnaire here.

3. Gather all the information in advance.Text, pictures, explanations of what you do, sell or want to say. A web designer is a smart person – that’s not in dispute, but they do not know everything about every trade there is and are certainly not copywriters. They can help but it’s your responsibility to gather the background so they can get an idea.

4. Make sure you have access and control to your domain name and hosting space. If you require work to be done on an existing website, there’s nothing more limiting than to find out that it’s a bloke that you once knew who officially owns your domain and he’s gone walkabout – you’ll have very little hope of getting it transferred to you quickly, if at all.

5. Listen to the web developer in terms of the schedule and how long things will take. Just because you’ve decided you need the site now, does not mean it needs to be rushed. A rushed website will be nothing more than an ill-thought out set of incoherent web pages. Modern websites are not just ‘whizzed together’ – despite what 1and1, Wix.com or an episode of Spooks would have you believe.

In summary, be realistic about what can be achieved for the launch. Better it is smaller but accurate than massive and full of mistakes and things that don’t make sense. The good thing about a website over a piece of printed marketing material is that it can be changed at any time – literally, anytime if you’ve got your website designer to build the website with a CMS (content management system) that allows you to update it yourself. (and we recommend you do!).

Once you’ve launched your first set of pages, start planning what is in the next round of updates. It’ll make for a better, more manageable website for you and a better experience for your visitors.


 

Next time…

The part 4 of our Top 10 Common Business Website Mistakes (with solutions!) will cover some important aspects around the category of Google and Search best practice with a focus on better on-page SEO.