Website design and development is going to take time and cost you money. You perhaps know that well enough, but so did all other entrepreneurs who eventually had a frustrating time with getting their businesses online. What did they do wrong and what can you learn from their mistakes? Here are a few things we found out most first-time online businesses did wrong. Interested in knowing more?
1. Non-objective Online Goals
What do you want to achieve with your website? Is it a front for your offline business? Is it a separate entity that has to meet certain sales goals you have set for it? Or is it to promote your new products and services? Websites are not all multi functional, huge online collections of information and services, some are meant to do one simple thing well too. What do you want from your website? Big corporations can afford to make mistakes, though they don’t – but if they do, they have the money to remake an entire website, you being an entrepreneur don’t have that kind of financial freedom to make costly mistakes. Before you hire a web development company, be clear about the online goals you want to achieve. Keep it simple at the beginning, you can always have the website scaled up later on.
2. Hiring Hacks To Save Money
Being economical is a survival skill for any entrepreneur. Economical decisions should not be bad decisions. Unfortunately, sometimes they are. Amateur designers will quote you less money for the designing work compared to a professional web development company. But for the additional money you will get a website that is professionally designed, intuitively made, bug tested on a wide range of devices – something you will never ever have from an amateur hack. Hiring amateurs is the worst mistake you can make.
3. Giving Up Too Early
Even with highly skilled teams of designers and developers you may not get things right at the first attempt and that is normal. There are no templates for success, you will have to go through the entire prototyping, wire framing, designing and bug testing phase – one by one – and it takes time. So giving up early is not an option at all if you want a really great website. Get a practical time estimate for every phase before you start and be prepared to let processes run its course.
4. Ignoring SEO
When you hire a web developer for your website, you should also think about SEO at the same time. SEO cannot be an afterthought, absolutely not when you are starting out with a new online asset. People need to know of your business and the only way to that is through search engine optimization and search marketing. From beginning to end, you are going to have to pay for the optimization process and SEO is an absolute prerequisite to make your business visible on search engines.
5. Unreliable Website Hosting Services
Imagine this, you wanted to get an ice-cream and headed straight for your favorite ice-cream store, but found it closed! What would you do? Obviously, you are going to get your ice-cream but from a different shop! Your favorite shop just lost a business and a loyal customer. Now imagine you were that ice-cream shop! As long as you are closed, you keep losing businesses. That’s what happens your web hosting service provider fails to keep you online. A good website is no good if it is not online. Look for a web hosting provider that guarantees 99% up time or more. Usually web development agencies can hook you up with good hosting service providers too.
Getting a new website online is one of the preliminaries you need to complete to compete online. These pitfalls we listed here are some of the most common ones and there are some more that you need to watch out for. We advise you to reach out to an established web development company for a really smooth experience.
Source by Umesh Gautam