Top 7 Small Business Website Mistakes and How to Overcome Them

In these days when digital commerce is the in-thing if your business does not have a website you’re indeed sabotaging your own success. But having a business website is not enough. That website should be able to meet the challenges of doing business online.

As you may be aware already, your small business website is most times, the first “touch-point” for potential customers. These days’ buyers use the search engines and social media platforms to research potential businesses before they buy. Whenever such potential customer finds you through such a search and visits your site they expect to meet a business that can help them with the solution they are looking for.

But how do they know if you can help them do this?

They can know that by what they see on your website. In a matter of seconds if they think otherwise, your competition is a click away!

Yes, First Impression Do Matter!

In this article I want to share with you a few mistakes of many small business websites in today’s internet culture. I will also attempt to proffer a solution for each.

So here we go…

7 Mistakes Your Small Business Website Should Avoid

1. Infrequent Updates

What is really the purpose of your business site? Well, one is helping your current and potential customers know your business better. And how do you do this? Through the content on your site.

This means to have a website that gains the most business, you must have the best, most up-to-date website possible. If a visitor feels that you do not properly maintain and update you business site, then chances are they will leave and find a similar business that does.

Solution: Constantly update your website content. If you’re not good with writing it’s advisable to get a professional web content writer to do this for you. Besides knowing that writing for the web is something that many small business persons do not have the experience of, the best route is definitely hiring the services of web content writers.

2. Javascript Pop Ups

A JavaScript pop up is a notification window that opens when you visit a website that states a message and has an “ok” button at the end. This was extremely popular during the website boom, but quickly become a no-no, mainly because people over used it. Not only would they add the pop up to the main page of their website, but they would also add one to each and every sub page.

Typically these pop ups did not contain any information that would be viewed as important to the viewer. It was annoying back then when e-commerce was in its infancy and it is much more annoying even now, since newer computer system also have a noise that goes with the popup.

Solution: There is a whole lot of things you can do to grow your business but Javascript is definitely not one of them. So, avoid the use of Javascript on your business sites. If you have a message that MUST display to the user before they can go further on your website, then a JavaScript pop up may still be a good option, but I strongly caution you to not overuse it.

3. Heavy Graphics

A lot of researches have shown that slow loading websites puts off visitors and ultimately affect your business, negatively. Here are some stats that will interest you: 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. (Source)

It is important to note this especially since a good percentage of your visitors will be on a dialup connection. This means they will have trouble downloading your website if you have a large number of graphics on your website.

Solution: Unless your website is in flash (which I would advise against anyway) I suggest you try and avoid using any type of animated graphic, since they typically have large file sizes.

4. Using Heavy, High Contracting Colors

This was another thing that was popular during the internet boom that quickly became unpopular due to overuse. It was once believed that high contracting colors would grab the user’s attention. While this is true, it also has a negative effect since it would hurt the user eyes, and sway them away from the website.

Solution: Case studies like this one on colors and its effect on ecommerce success can help you when you choose your business website’s colors. The choice of your website color is actually based mainly on your business type. My website design company can greatly help you in this area if you need a professional touch!

5. Clutter Up Pages

If your website seems to be cluttered visitors will be less likely to view further into it, especially if they think they will have to weed out the information they need from the information that is useless to them.  Your site visitors have a lot of things fighting for their attention. You need therefore to make it easy for them to find what they want on your site so they can get about other things!

Solution: Do not have too much information on each page. You shouldn’t put more than one topic on each. Besides, you should have a good navigation system on your small business site and this will eliminate any problem you may have.

6. Lack of a Navigation System

As mentioned in point #5 above, a good navigation system is a good help in eliminating the problem of clutter. This was something that was lacking in many of the websites created during the internet boom. Once a visitor clicked on a page they were taken to a new page without a way to return or access additional pages within the website. Unfortunately, many small business website are still making this mistake today.

A navigation system insures that the visitor will be able to view your entire website. It will take the visitor back to the page that they originally come from, to the main page, and to the other major parts of the website. Additionally, the navigation (typically near the bottom of the page) should have links to things such as website polices and term and conditions.

Solution: Read solution to #5 mistake above!

Recommended: Best Ways To Easily Get Your Website Noticed Online!

7. Overusing Advertising

This is actually a fairly new problem with website, especially since Google started their Adsense program. Many websites have more ads then information on the page. A visitor does not want to have to weed though the ads to find the content that they are looking for.

The irony of the situation is: A visitor is more likely to click on an advertisement link if they do not feel that they are being bombarded by them. This is defiantly a situation where the saying “less is more” is true.

Solution: If you must place adverts on your small business website then understanding where to place them on the site matters. This article is a good read on this topic.

Conclusion

Your small business needs a website to compete favorably in our today’s digital economy. However, not all websites are built the same. Stay away from these website mistakes when building your business website. More importantly, ensure your business website is constantly updated.

From experience we've discovered that most small business persons do not update their business website because of the technicalities involved. But you can overcome this if your business website is built with a simple and understandable CMS like WordPress.org. It will do your small business great good therefore if you have such a website that you can easily update and maintain without resorting to some “experts”.

If you need such a great website solution for your small business then check out my website design company today.

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