4 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Developing Their Website

Building a website is fairly easy, especially if you have an expert to do it for you.

But, the real challenge lies in making the website engaging, persuasive, and useful to the intended users. Many first time online entrepreneurs mistake website for it’s very important role.

A business website is your face to the digital world. It plays a part in customer first impression and affects how your target users interact with your online business in different phases.

Avoiding the common pitfalls in website development can help you minimize your chances of getting ignored by your target customers and attract more business opportunities in return.

1.) Lack of quality website copy and search-engine friendly content

Content is a ranking factor in search results. Quality content and content structure goes hand in hand in making your website attractive in the eyes of your customers and search engines. When writing your content, make sure that you are writing for both.

Your customers are hungry for information. Think of the main points that could be a driving factor for any customer to look for your website and craft your content around their pain points, not yours. One of the most common mistake in website copywriting is the “we, we, we” syndrome. Remember that your customers probably already have an idea of what your business does but they would like to know how you can make their lives better or provide a solution to a specific problem.

Once you’ve made sure that you have the most usable content for your target users, don’t forget to make your copy readable. There are designers who would just put a block of text on a webpage and totally neglect the importance of having headings, subheadings, and bullet points in the body of text.

2.) Poor navigation

Bad navigation can easily throw off users. Remember that your customers are enabled to find their way around and get to their point of interests within a website seamlessly. While there is no standard navigation format for all industries, making your website navigation intuitive and consistent is not very hard at all.

Suggestions:

• To make your navigation smooth, use textual descriptions for all links, put alternative text on all image, and provide alternative text description techniques for Flash or Javascript links.
• Organize your navigation according to your theme. If your website serves a personal purpose, you may get away with a simple navigation. But, a business website should invest more in the clarity and structure of their navigation.

3.) Lack of white space

White space may seem like a minor details in web design but it actually directs the eye to important parts of a website such as call-to-action buttons and important links. Also called negative space, white space draws attention to elements of a page that could be an important feature of a website.  

Is it the really of a big deal?

Below are a couple of informative articles to give you an idea on the relevance of negative space in web design:

• A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts
• The Value Of White Space
• Whitespace

4.) No prominent call-to-action

Most newbie web designers often forget the importance of having clear and prominent call-to-actions in every page of the website. There is no point in having a website if you can’t capture new leads.

So ask yourself, do want your target customers to download, subscribe, view, share, buy or follow your social media sites?

Always bear in mind that every website’s goal is to put people into action.

These four points are only some of the major factors in making an established website. Before designing your website, make sure that your web developer and web designer take these into consideration.