Today there are so many online tools that make it easy for a company to create their own website and if money is tight it can be tempting to see this as a cost-saving exercise. Perhaps a nephew has offered to help and since they spend half their waking life with eyes fixed on an iPad or a mobile, then surely they will understand how to get the company an online presence? This route will certainly be cheaper in the short term than engaging a professional web designer, but in the long term the DIY web route may be a costly mistake.
5 Mistakes to avoid with a DIY Website
Mistake 1. Lock yourself into a particular platform
Many web hosting companies provide a free or cheap-to-use web-builder so that customers can create their own site on the domain they have just registered. This gives you a website quickly and at minimal cost. However, these websites only exist whilst you have the domain name with that particular hosting company. They cannot be moved elsewhere and they cannot be developed as the business grows. Since they rarely give you good control over the elements of the site that affect SEO, you will eventually want to move to a different platform.
Furthermore some companies offering web builders make it very difficult even to move your domain name so you can have a professional site created or may also charge an admin fee to release it.
Mistake 2. Pick a generic template for your website
Often a DIY website is a first web presence for a small business. The idea is to “test the water” and see how successful it is before making a bigger investment by having a professional design. The problem with this approach is that in order to be a success a website must help to build your company brand, it must invite visitors, educate potential customers and engage with them. If all you do is pick a standard template from a web-builder or from the bank of WordPress templates available, and then pop your logo on the top, your site will fail to invite, educate and engage and will certainly not build your brand online. The result? As you can guess – the test is considered a failure!
Mistake 3. Create a cluttered home page
Your home page is a shop-window for your business and it REALLY matters how it presents your goods or services. Don’t waste time welcoming people to the site. The main heading should be engaging – let your visitors know quickly who you are and what your company can do for them. A modern, clean design with plenty of white space will be far more effective than dense reams of text. Too many different graphics with different messages, particularly animated gifs, Flash animations or scrolling information will just be a distraction. A visitor who is distracted will rarely take the action you want them to.
Mistake 4. Ignore mobile devices
An internet novice might imagine that making their website mobile-friendly is not a priority. After all how many people will be using a phone or tablet to search for your product or service? You may therefore be shocked to know that by early 2014 mobile internet usage overtook desktop PC internet use. And if you are thinking that these figures are merely a reflection of people logging onto social media profiles for personal use or checking their emails, think again. Decision-makers in business were surveyed (IDG Global Mobile Survey) about their internet usage to discover at what time of day they might research products or services for their business using a mobile device.
69% used their phone and 71% used a tablet during work – that is at a time when they would be most likely to have the option of searching on a desktop-PC. Furthermore at least 42% of those business people surveyed admitted to searching online during their commute, 73% in the evening and 51% at weekends. How long will these decision-makers stay on your website if it is not mobile friendly?
Another statistic that should make you consider the mobile friendliness of your site is “70% of mobile searches lead to online action within an hour.” (A Study with SurveyMonkey by iACQuire) In other words people who use mobile internet are ready to engage, they are not idly browsing to fill time.
Mistake 5. Ignore Website Security
Any website which has an online admin console that allows you, the site owner, to log in and edit pages is a potential target for hackers. The software for these CMS sites (such as WordPress or web-builders) will need to stay one-step ahead of these hackers. You may be fortunate with a web-builder if your hosting company applies automatic updates for you which will plug any vulnerabilities that are found. Developers working with WordPress are great at spotting weaknesses and providing updates to the software, but it is the site-owners responsibility to apply them. If you rarely log into your admin panel and you ignore update notices when you see them, then your website will be vulnerable.
WordPress also comes with a vast array of great plugins which add functionality to your site, but these must be kept up to date too. It is not a certainty that the developer who created the plugin will be checking for vulnerabilities and creating patches if they are found, but if they do and you don’t update, then again your site may be vulnerable.
