When building your first website it is easy to make mistakes. Here is a brief list of some of the more common ones and how to avoid them.
Using a Free Host for a Commercial Site
Don’t ever build a business website using a free service. They will place ads on your pages, which will make your site look unprofessional and scare away potential customers. You will need to use a subdomain (yourname.freehost.com) instead of your own domain name (www.yourname.com), again making your site look amateurish. Also, building a site using a free hosting service means you will be completely dependent upon them. If they ever go out of business you will lose your site and moving it will be pretty much impossible without starting again from zero. The best way to create a site for your business is to invest in a reliable hosting account and a domain name and build it using a proven site builder like WordPress.
Not Knowing Your Target Audience
Before building your site, you should think about what kind of people should be visiting it. This will not only affect what your site looks like, but also the kind of content you need to create. What is your ideal visitor looking for? Is he looking to buy something or is he just looking for information? What kind of keywords will he type in to search engines to find your site? These are all very important questions you should be asking yourself before you get started building your site.
Using Too Many Flashy Banners and Graphics
A lot of people who are new to building and designing websites will add a lot of animated and flahsy graphics to their pages, thinking it will look good. The truth is that this will only make your pages look amateurish and ugly. When it comes to the design of your pages ,you should always aim for a simple, clean look that compliments the theme of your site and/or business.
Not Having a Good Navigation Structure
Your site needs to be as easy to navigate as possible. You should create one or more navigation bars that are easily visible. For larger sites; you should take some time to plan out how your pages will be connected to eachother.
Not Tracking Where Your Visitors Come From
If you want to build a successful site you need to keep track of where your visitors are coming from. The best wayto do this is by using the very powerful, free tracking tool called Google Analytics. It shows you exactly how people find your site, what pages they look at, how long they stay and much more. You NEED to use this.
