Whether your business is in plumbing, accounting, dog walking, cake making, car repairs, selling homemade jams, or any of the other 130,000 incredibly diverse businesses that are the throbbing economic engine of Essex, it probably goes without saying that you need a website. The online world is now so dominant that, in the eyes of millions of potential customers, you simply don’t exist if you’re not online. However, there are plenty of mistakes and traps waiting to snare entrepreneurs along the road to website success. Let’s take a closer look at these below.
Employing an amateur web designer
The first common mistake is known as the “I know someone whose son/daughter/cousin etc. can knock you up a cheap website for £50” gambit. We’ve all heard it. Like all urban myths, there’s a grain of truth to it, but it hides a much bigger and harder reality. Yes, a lot of people can put a website together, but it isn’t going to make your business the number one result on Google and it’s definitely not going to help you to your first million. False economy doesn’t really begin to cover it. It’s a bit like saying that anyone with a pair of pliers can do a safe job of rewiring your house.
Not knowing what you want to achieve
So, you’ve decided to put your trust in a professional web designer in Essex who knows how to make sure that your site works on all desktops, laptops and smartphones, and is relatively ‘future proof’. So far, so good. However, even the very best website designer can’t do a great job unless you have a clear picture of what you want. This sounds simple and obvious. It’s not.
“I want an all-singing, all-dancing website to bring me more business.” Of course you do, we all want that. But let’s look a little deeper. We need to ask ourselves a few searching questions: What specific function does the website have? How will potential or existing customers find the website? What will they be looking for when they land on it? What added-value, information or other incentives can we offer them to keep them engaged with us, to bookmark our page, and to keep returning? It’s much smarter – and more cost-effective in the long run – to get these fundamentals right at the start of the journey than it is to go back and fix them later.
A good web designer will work with you to explore these and many other structural questions, long before you start getting excited about interesting visuals and wizard functionality.
Neglecting your website
The third mistake often follows the successful launch of a gleaming new website. It’s called neglect. Have a look at some of your competitors’ sites and you’ll probably soon find an example. You can often spot this by looking at the ‘News’ section, which was last updated in 2012, soon after the site was launched. If your website isn’t alive and kicking, it’s not achieving anything; it’s sending out a signal that your business is half asleep – if it’s still breathing at all.
Luckily, mistakes like these, and many others, can be easily avoided by putting your trust in professionals like Healy Web Design. After all, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”
