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5 Mistakes To Avoid When Building A Business Website

In Business
September 06, 2021
Technology Strategy

For many businesses, their website is the main point of contact for their company. Even with a physical locale, most customers will engage with a company’s website before interacting with the business in person. Therefore, it’s crucial that your website be error-free. Here are five typical mistakes that companies make with their website and how to avoid them.

  1. Making it Difficult for People to Connect With You

People come to your website to find out specific information. For starters, they want to know who you are, what you do, whether you can solve their problems, and how they can contact you.

Therefore, it’s vital that your site provides an easy way for your potential and existing clients to communicate with you by including a contact page. This page should detail how they can connect with a real person to answer their questions. Ideally, there should be more than one contact option. So, for example, phone and email, or email and live chat. You may also want to consider adding a contact form to simplify the process further.

  1. Not Catering Your Site to The Needs of Your Target Audience

Your website needs to serve the needs of your target audience so as to guide them into a relationship with your business. Accordingly, your site should focus on the things that matter to them.

It’s important to remember that your target audience will know nothing about your product, service, or company. So you can’t use insider language to describe what you do and offer. (Unless you’re building an insider website). Instead, you need to ensure that every page, graphic, link, and text on your site speak to your customer in a language they will understand. Furthermore, your site should be dedicated to showing potential customers what pain points your product or service solves so they understand why they need your business in their life.

It’s also important that your calls-to-action (CTAs) be clear and relevant to your target audience. This means that they should all encourage site visitors to further their relationship with you.

  1. DIY Website Design

Although there are literally hundreds of inexpensive ways to build a website, that doesn’t mean you should use one to create your site. The truth is, unless you’re a web designer, you shouldn’t design your website yourself.

Your business website is the starting point for the vast majority of your customers, and it may be the endpoint as well. Therefore, to get the most value out of it, you need to invest some money into getting it done right. This means finding a designer and developer to work with. These professionals understand how to evaluate the message you want to communicate and can help you create a design that represents your brand.

Additionally, web professionals can help you find the appropriate web hosting for business websites. This is important because your web host is responsible for keeping your site online, so you need one that is reliable and offers fast page loading speeds.

  1. Letting Your Site Fall Out of Date

You might think that you can create a website and then walk away, but the truth is that to remain relevant to search engines and your customers, you need to be creating new content regularly. If, for example, the last blog entry on your site is from four months ago, then you’re sending a message that you don’t really care whether anyone comes to the page. By comparison, if you update your site regularly, you’re letting people know that you’re active and in business.

You also need to make sure to keep your contact information current and if you’re a retail establishment, make sure your website has your hours of operation. In other words, always be thinking like a customer, and make sure that any information they may want is available and up to date.

  1. Creating a Site That’s Not Mobile-Friendly

Mobile internet users account for approximately half of all global web traffic. According to Statista, 54.8% of web traffic worldwide came from mobile devices. This means that if your site is not mobile-friendly, you’re losing out on the chance to reach half of your potential clients. Furthermore, sites that aren’t mobile responsive send the message that you don’t really care about generating new business. Essentially, you’re saying we couldn’t be bothered to take the time to use a mobile responsive theme that every content management platform offers. This is not the message you want to be sent to customers.