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Websites are a necessary part of any business, large or small. But, building and maintaining a website can be daunting – especially if you’re making common mistakes. In this blog post, we’ll outline some of the most common DIY website mistakes and how to avoid them. Stay tuned for more tips on creating and maintaining your business website!
Having a website for your business is no longer optional in 2021. If you don’t have a website, you are losing out on a vast number of potential sales and returning customers – harming the growth of your company exponentially and even affecting the sustainability of your business venture in the long run.
However, the current cost of professional websites and the easily available online DIY options are luring all the more business owners into trying their hand at building their own website. Sometimes nothing is attractive as a shortcut. DIY might seem tempting in the beginning and quite deceptively simple – unfortunately it can very quickly lead to a world of frustration, wasted time and a far from finished, sub-par product that would literally put your company to shame.
Even if you possess a ton of creativity and a keen eye for design, there is a lot more to building a website than pure aesthetics. Constructing an effective and fully functional website depends on various aspects, such as the quality of design, simple user experience, easy navigation, readily available information and content, mobile responsiveness and much, much more. At the end of the day, most of the time, a DIY website project ends up costing you more in wasted time and resources than having appointed a professional from the very start.
There is one, extremely vital aspect that you need to keep in mind – for most customers (in today’s digital era) your website will be their first impression as to your business and its authenticity and professionalism. If you have a poorly designed, unprofessional and unresponsive website that is difficult to navigate or understand, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Not only will visitors refrain from buying from you or using your services, (and potential advise others to do the same), but you might have lost a potential life-long client due to a technicality and misconception as to the nature of your business.
Below, we share some of the biggest DIY Website Mistakes people make when attempting to design their own website –
Haphazard & irrelevant content
Without a keen idea of how to create a professional layout, a lot of people sometimes just think – the more, the merrier. Unfortunately, this is not the case. You also get others that think the exact opposite, thinking that less is more – leaving our critical information about the company. Ultimately, you need to find a balance between content and graphics – sharing enough in order to sell your product and service, but not so much that people get frustrated sifting through tons of irrelevant content.
Poor Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is the process of helping a website rank higher on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. A lot of DIY websites are very poorly optimized for search engines and as such, don’t show up when someone searches for your website. Remember, if search engines cannot easily find your website, neither can potential customers. A high search engine ranking is one of the best ways for potential customers to connect with you over the internet.
Non-responsive & non-mobile-friendly
Having a responsive design is crucial in order to accommodate visitors irrespective of which device or platform they are browsing on – the problem is that creating a responsive design requires experience which you lack in as a DIY’er. You need to consider screen size, fonts, images, mobile, clickable link sizes and much more. If a user cannot navigate your website easily or struggle to even simply view your site, the chances are that they won’t be coming back and you might have just lost a potential customer.
Weak website security
When building your website, you need to understand that your website is an extension of yourself and forms part of your reputation. Not only do you have to take the necessary measures to ensure that your website is up to date with all relevant security measures, you also have to ensure that your website is safe, as you will be working with sensitive information provided by your customers.
If you’re making any of these common DIY website mistakes, it’s time to rethink your strategy. All of the websites we’ve looked at today suffered from one or more of these issues, which can be easily avoided.
With a little bit of effort and some professional help, you can create a website that not only looks great but also ranks high in search engine results pages and is secure against cyber attacks. Need help getting started?
