Consumers nowadays are searching for information for a better purchasing experience. It’s already proven many times by business experts that the majority of consumers always gather information about the product or service before they purchase it online or at the store.
This consumer behavior amplifies the importance of having a fully-functioning website for your business. A successful business or company in today’s modern age has a fully-functioning website on its side. Generally, a business website is the backbone of a company as it supports all the digital marketing strategies and efforts.
Its importance stretches to every aspect of a business’s digital marketing strategy. The pieces of content, the type of communication, and the advertisements you put on your website will encourage your customers to visit it more often.
However, many businesses out there are too complacent. They think putting a website alone is enough. Truth is, a website won’t function by itself. A website is more than just a homepage, a bunch of images, and a “contact us” page. Unfortunately, many business websites have a generic look and generic function that does not help the business it serves at all.
Creating a business website needs a professional approach not just to make it appear attractive to its visitors but as a catalyst that helps a business move towards progress.
It’s very delightful to see that more businesses, especially startups and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), are now encouraged to build their own website. More and more businesses are learning about what makes a good web design. If you’re one of them, it’s also important for you to learn the most common website mistakes that might hurt your business. Pointing out these mistakes will help you avoid them, so read on to learn.
Having a Very Poor Website Design
Certainly, the most common mistake in creating a business website is having a poor web design. This damages your brand’s reputation for many reasons. Creating a website these days is completely easy knowing. There are “website-making tools” offering you tons of templates and designs. You can choose from a wide array of features, plug-ins, and images that help customer interaction along with other elements that are essential for making a website.
However, putting all of these features on your website will just make it very cluttered. For customers, this will be an eyesore. It will just create confusion for your site visitor because they can’t easily find the specific product or service they are looking for.
Instead, give your website a neat and responsive design that further integrates customer interaction and experience by removing unnecessary features. In short, give the visitors an easy way to navigate through your website. The design should have the features that direct the visitors to the products and services directly to improve your conversion funnel.
Features may look attractive and fun to look at, but it will just ultimately drag the visitor’s attention away from one of the most important aspects of your site—converting visitors into customers.
Uploading Bad-Quality Images and Videos
Pixelated pictures and grainy videos are just things of the past. However, many websites out there still use these, which badly affects their brand reputation. Bad-quality images and videos of your products or services on your site just reflect the poor business strategy that you are following. As they say, first impressions last. Your site visitors will surely perceive your brand as not worthy of their trust because it looks unprofessional.
If your company doesn’t have a photographer that can produce high-quality and attractive pictures of your products or services, your best option is to subscribe to stock photo sites that offer high-quality images you can use at a very affordable price.
For videos, you can practice recording videos like a professional. If you’re too busy, you can assign someone from your team to practice how to record videos like a pro. It’s not that difficult these days knowing that there are tons of tutorial videos you can watch online. Smartphones nowadays can also record high-definition videos as a DSLR camera can. Just provide them with the needed equipment like tripods, stabilizers, and lighting to produce high-quality videos of your products or services.
Crappy Website Content
Producing good-quality content for a business-oriented site is kind of tricky. It needs a professional approach to writing readworthy blogs, articles, and product descriptions.
Unfortunately, many websites out there disregard the importance of having good quality content. They seem to be satisfied with uploading their products or services with boring descriptions. While some sites out there may regularly produce content, they use a lot of text, sometimes even huge blocks of text, and use jargon excessively.
Make sure that your site’s blog or article is not too long. An ideal blog or article can be finished reading within 10 minutes. Longer than that is already dragging and boring. Be on point in delivering the desired message on your blog or article. Produce a blog or article concisely, and don’t forget to insert pictures or videos for additional information. Use bullets or numbers in specifying the information you’re trying to tell instead of using large blocks of texts. Make your messages easy to understand and read so that you can communicate clearly to your visitors, this means avoiding jargon that your audience may not understand.
Lastly, don’t produce self-serving website content. Instead of using “I” or “we” in your statements, you should focus on how your products or services can provide solutions to your customers. Your business should be all about your customers.
The Absence of Call-To-Actions (CTA)
A website that lacks or has no CTA misses out on the opportunity to obtain more customers through conversions. Regardless of your site’s goal, put an effort to offer the visitors an easy way for them to navigate your site and initiate your conversion funnel. Unfortunately, many business-oriented sites lack or do not have CTAs that kill conversion. CTAs are pretty easy to include on your website. All you need to do is place the CTA buttons strategically across your website and its content to provide an immediate response to your customers’ queries.
The most basic, but effective CTA buttons are: Buy Now, Contact Us Now, Sign Up Now, Get a Free Quote Now, and Get a Free Discount Now!
You can insert CTAs in between paragraphs of your content and make sure your CTAs are relevant to the content. Also, you can insert CTAs below or above your uploaded images.
Not Updating the Site at All
An outdated website will lose its relevance on the search engine. Meaning, it will not be found easily on your preferred search engine, especially Google. Websites that are not updated for months or even a year will eventually fade and be forgotten. Unfortunately, many business-oriented sites rarely update their sites, and this hurts them badly in terms of conversion and customer trust.
Websites that are not updated regularly have slow loading speed and contain old content published dating back months or even years ago.
Why is updating your site important? First, it improves your website security. Second, it keeps up with the latest trends. Also, it speeds up your site by using web development technology aimed at making your pages load faster for customer convenience and lowering the bounce rate.
An updated site also improves your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and enables you to add more integrations through installing plug-ins and third-party applications that further provide customer convenience and improve website performance.
Conclusion
Having a fully-functioning website that provides great customer experience and interaction helps establish credibility for your business. Avoiding these mistakes will do a lot in helping you build a reputable site.
