Mistakes Small Businesses Make With Websites:
There a lot of bad websites on the web. We are convinced that a bad website is worse than no website at all because it is often the first impression of your business and if it looks cheap or doesn’t work that is what customers will associate with your business. We understand that small businesses don’t have marketing departments, or the time to research best practices, and best practices can often be very different for large and small companies; so mistakes get made.
We went through some recent sites that have come to our attention and made a list of some pitfalls that small businesses should avoid when designing and building a website.
1. Make a plan: I can’t tell you how many companies, both large and small seem to have a website because they think they need one. The website has some basic information, and maybe some pictures, but no real information and no sense of how people should go through it. Small businesses need to have a plan before a site ever gets launched.
The first step is deciding what the site is for. This step is often overlooked. Is it an information sharing portal for your business holding store hours and contact information? That is a very basic site and the focus should be on making sure it looks its best and gives the feel of the company it represents. If the business wants to sell online they will need to decide how much of their product they want to sell online, how the inventory will be managed, and how the orders will come in.
Business owners need to think about how they want visitors to react to their sites and plan accordingly. You might design some pages as landing pages and others as pages that are design to be the second or third page viewed.
It also helps to completely design the site architecture, write out all the content on the site, and pick any pictures that are going to be on the site. While it doesn’t have to be set in stone, if all the content is ready before the first piece of code is written it will make the web site go up quicker and be more effective in the long term.
2. Avoid heavy use of flash, sound effects and other unnecessary bells and whistles: We know many designers who build only in Adobe Flash, and many do great work, however they are doing a serious disservice to 90% of their clients. To search engine spiders and bots Flash is viewed as an image, which makes an all Flash page basically invisible to the search engines. This makes it very difficult to achieve solid organic rankings in the Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other engines. Through a strong link building campaign it is possible but it is a major handicap and in any competitive space it will be a real hindrance.
There are other sites that don’t use flash but are completely image based. These sites have the same problem as Flash sites, they are invisible to the the engines. A good rule of thumb is if you can’t highlight, copy and paste the text than the search engines can’t see it.
A personal pet peeve of mine is websites that talk, play music or sound when you first arrive without giving you a choice. There is a place for video on your site and those people who walk out and talk to customers, but if you surprise people with sound many will quickly back out or close their browsers. Also, many prospects search from work computers and don’t want loud a video letting their co-workers know what sites they are viewing. ESPN is a major offender of this and that is one of the major reasons I get most of my sports news from CNNSi. The proper way to use video on your site is to start the video running with the mute on and a large button or slider to turn the volume on. The customer can make the decision then if they want to hear the sound or not.
3. Don’t be overly ambitious: We see this a lot from small businesses but I think it is often the fault of the web designers. Your site does not have to do everything imaginable, especially if it is the first site going up for a small business. The site needs to portray the image and brand of the business and follow the plan that was set at the beginning. It probably does not need customer forums, the ability to upload video, web 2.0 interactivity or any other buzz word. Every one of those bells and whistles probably won’t be used and they can also break, making your site look bad. Focus on the plan and how you want visitors to react to your site.
We have also seen more and more small businesses with advertising on their site. This is generally a bad idea for most small businesses. We have worked so hard to get people to your site, why do you want to lead them off of it?
4. Too little content: Many sites have far too little content for what they are trying to accomplish. We want clean sites that are not just long paragraph after long paragraph, but if handled correctly most websites could be much more content rich. Users can click through to a new page, read an excerpt and decide to read more, or scan bullet points and then scroll down to read the whole article. Let the user select how in-depth they want to get with your site, it will give your site more authority, keywords and build more trust with your customers.
5. Track the results: This is absolutely essential and something that small businesses do far too little of. For a business website it is imperative to constantly track traffic to your site and see how visitors are reacting. If 90% of the traffic that hits your home page leaves immediately, we probably have a problem. You can also track paths and make sure visitors are reacting in the manner that you planned. If not, make changes. The tools are there, they just need to be used.
So those are 5 rules of mistakes that small businesses make when building a new website. If you have questions or would like more information about small business web design, just drop us a line. We are happy to run a free analysis on any site.