When you own a small business your website is one place you can make a serious impact. By creating an impressive website you can drive traffic to your products, increase sales, and build your brand. A website helps answer your customers’ questions, provides inspiration and entertainment, and increases your reputation. Until your website starts working against you. If you get your website wrong you risk losing money and customers. Unfortunately, small businesses all too often make these common mistakes. Create a better impression and grow your business by avoiding these mistakes. Can you seriously say you’re not making any of them?
1. Failing to Understand the Target Market
You know how it is – you’re so focused on getting your website finished and published that you skip the necessary research into your market. You can see this all too often with small business websites – the required
amount of images, some decent design, but too little thought into what customers actually want from the website. For example, older online shoppers may need more assurances about online safety when inputting credit card details. Young, technologically-savvy customers need a site that is optimised for smartphones that’s low on text. You need to know where your users will want to go in your site – the only way to understand this is to know your market.
2. Going it Alone
You wouldn’t do your accounts if you were not completely confident about your accounting ability, so why would you design your own website with no design experience whatsoever? Unfortunately many small business owners try to save a few pounds by going down the DIY route. At best this results in frustration and stress, at worst it provides a poorly designed and executed site that doesn’t work properly – save yourself the trouble and opt for a web designer like www.xist2.com instead.
3. Flashy Graphics, No Coherence
Design for the sake of design is no help – and it will turn off many of your would-be customers. Sites with graphics that leap out of the page and design that overpowers the product will not win you any customers and will only result in the site loading slow and increasing users’ frustrations. Design is important but it should never be at the expense of functionality and ease of use.
4. Using Substandard Content
Design is important, but content is crucial. People don’t tend to visit websites for the images, so your site needs to give the information your customers need in a clear, entertaining way that suits your brand. It is particularly important that content is fresh and up-to-date – you cannot expect to sell product if people think you have gone out of business. Keep content current and update your blog on a weekly basis.
5. Trying to Do Everything
Your website can be impressive but it can never do everything – for example, you cannot expect to sell legal services while also catering for a video gaming population. You need to design your website for the people that will end up doing business with you; not anyone who happens on your link.
Image courtesy of jesadaphorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
