Mistakes to avoid when creating a website

Surely you have already read many tips on how to create a successful website, with issues that involve choosing a good hosting and the main platforms and CMS's to build a good web design.

However, today our approach will be a little different, and therefore we are going to show what are the main mistakes when creating a website. These tips address actions you shouldn't be doing in any way on your project.

Index of contents

Lack of visual identity

The visual identity is made up of the entire graphic structure of a brand or company. It reflects the essence of a business through elements such as the logo, letters, symbols, colors and other elements that serve to identify an organization.

When creating a website, its elements must be in accordance with the visual identity of your company for brand recognition to be generated. The lack of visual identity means that users and consumers do not identify with a company precisely due to the absence of its original elements.

Do you want a practical example? We all know that McDonald's colors are yellow and red. However, if you entered a store of this brand, but that had blue and green colors, wouldn't you feel strange? Would you like to consume in that place? Probably not, since you will not be associating the elements (colors) with the true brand, and thus you would not be sure that the products sold there are the same or are plagiarism.

In a site this same association occurs, since if the colors, logo, formats and designs are not in accordance with the visual identity of the company, it may cause mistrust and discredit on the part of the user.

A poor and rustic design

Creating a website with huge and ugly banners, pop-ups everywhere, shocking colors, distorted images, and other weird stuff may not be a good strategy.

The previous description is the representation of a website that generates total credibility in the user, in addition to weakening the reputation of a company. This type of site will not represent the central idea of ​​your company and, consequently, will end up generating loss of business.

It is important to develop a good website and invest in modern and functional templates that are easy to navigate. Opt for clean models that do not affect the readability of other elements such as text, for example.

If your company does not transmit trust and does not seem to respond to the needs of the user (and if they tell you about it…), the chances of it leaving your site are enormous. The website today is like a business card, and I bet you don't hand over an A4, handwritten card, do you? So don't do the same with your website. Therefore, invest in a professional and attractive design.

Think about how many times you haven't made a purchase because you didn't trust a company after seeing their site. Keep that in mind when building your own website. These little ones matter a lot.

Inefficient and unprofessional hosting

Hiring a poor quality hosting means starting badly with your website. The hosting provider is responsible for keeping your website online without interruptions, in addition to offering other services such as digital security tools and the management of your domain name.

In addition to having constant headaches, you will also feel the damage in your pocket with the loss of customers and possible business. A hosting service that lives by leaving your website offline does not offer satisfactory technical support or efficient extra services, it is certainly a scam.

Therefore, escape from these types of hostings and look for a provider that offers a stable service and good technical support, preferably 24/7.

The domain is not consistent with the business

The domain name makes it easy to identify your company on the internet. However, choosing it is a strategic task that can generate even more recognition.

This is a fairly common mistake that also occurs due to lack of business planning. You have created your website with a fresh design and according to your company, however, when registering a domain, you have chosen a totally disconnected name.

Very long, strange domains and with the use of foreign words only hinder the user's understanding, thus becoming an obstacle for your business. Therefore, think of a domain name from the beginning of the project to avoid problems and waste of time. For example, the case of Professional Review mixes Spanish and English, a "slight error", which took a long time for Google to recognize it as a brand.

Poor and poorly crafted content

Here's a bug that is recurring on most sites. Many focus on the design and characteristics of a web project, and end up forgetting this very valuable component: content.

Content is one of the elements that will define the quality of your website over time. What happens is the disconnection of the content with the purposes of the company, thus generating a disinterest on the part of the users.

Good content must be planned in advance and convey the main values ​​of an organization, in a way that is consistent with that of the other elements of the website. This means that it is also not convenient to exaggerate the amount of text or the number of images.

The rules of good content is that it is concise, coherent and in accordance with the message that the company or blog intends to convey.

All users enter sites with some objective: either information or a purchase. The biggest mistake of a portal is not being able to transmit information to its users, and the way a text is written contributes a lot to that.

We recommend reading our computer tutorials.

A clean text, well thought out and with clear objectives conveys a feeling of trust and transparency, while a poorly written text gives an impression of indifference and lack of professionalism. When creating new content, always think:

• Who is my reading public? What is the public looking for when entering each page of my website? What are the doubts they seek to remedy? What is the best way to present my point of view? What is the appropriate language?

Don't think about usability

Usability is the set of features that provides a good experience for those who access a web page. By accessing a website, the user expects to find what they are looking for quickly and without any difficulty.

What happens is that this is a completely forgotten factor or is not even remembered in most website designs, making the experience discouraging and unpleasant. Below, we can see some of the points that most negatively impact a website:

• Typography (difficult to understand fonts). Colors (strong colors that hinder the visualization of elements). Structure of pages (pages that contain scattered subjects). Contact (difficulty in identifying company contacts). Content (language difficult to be understood).

We always emphasize the importance of usability for the end user, since a little more time invested in this aspect is capable of reducing future costs and increasing profitability. It is worth a slightly higher investment in a powerful search system.

The site is not responsive

One thing is certain: people spend more time on their mobiles than doing other activities. For this reason, current sites must be responsive.

Although this is important, there are still some companies that do not invest in this type of format, and therefore, they end up being left behind, since the accesses made by mobile devices only tend to grow more each year.

So, if your website is not responsive, without a doubt, you are losing points against the competition and potential customers in such a busy market. In this way, correct this error and offer more possibilities of access to your users and clients.

More work is missing on social media

Just like mobile devices, social networks are also present in people's daily lives. The time spent on social media exceeds access to websites and this must be taken into account, even before creating your website.

Currently, all the content that is created has the objective of being shared on social networks to generate a viral effect and thus obtain maximum dissemination.

A site that does not have functions so that content can be shared, loses in traffic and accesses, in addition to not generating social commitment. Therefore, being out of social networks is being disconnected and out of the current world.

Therefore, it is important to install plugins on your website so that visitors are able to find them anywhere, in addition to receiving regular content from your company. Not making available the buttons to follow, share, and give a "like", are missed opportunities for the company.

Contact forms

One of the main objectives of a website is to generate new business. And for this to happen, the contact forms need to be easily visible and accessible.

A very common error that occurs is the difficulty of the user to find the phone number, address or e-mail of a company, as this data must be easily viewed.

Currently, website projects already have these contact details at the top of the page, making life easier for the user, who won't have to navigate to a page to find a simple phone number. If your website still doesn't use this structure, please review and correct this error. But keep in mind that you have to adapt your website to the new RGPD, both by law and so that your readers are 100% safe.

Exaggerating content with unnecessary numbers and information

Do you know someone who only knows how to talk about her all the time and has nothing more interesting to tell beyond her life? It is exactly what your website is going to show if you abuse institutional content.

This type of content focuses on the most particular and historical aspects of an organization. However, it is limited to a general and less complete summary.

A mistake that occurs is that some companies and brands end up exaggerating and showing off in these aspects, and end up turning the site into a kind of family album with irrelevant and unnecessary information for the final public.

Remember, the client wants to know about the solutions you offer to solve their problems, and has no interest in seeing the photos of the company's last year-end, nor the number of clients that the company got in the last month.

In any case, leave this information for the internal murals and the sales information for the shareholders, since the client wants to know how your company is going to solve the problem it has.

Don't think about SEO

When creating your internet environment, it is important to think about the indexing process by the various search engines, and optimize your website to ensure that it is found by your target audience. This task has a name: SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, and is made up of several activities that make it easy to read your website through Google.

It is worth doing a little research before starting any internet project, or to update your old portal. With a good approach and investment (time and perhaps economic) you can do great things.

Have no content editor

Content editors are platforms capable of creating, editing, managing and publishing content in an organized way and offer great ease of modification, without the need for a technical team to make modifications.

It is clear that you will not be able to move in all the functions of the site, such as customizing the entire website without prior training, but certainly, the content part will not be a problem if you use a CMS (Content Management System) such as Wordpress. With this, your maintenance cost is reduced considerably, and you will not need a technical team at every step, which leaves you freer to always include new content on the website. There are many websites that use.NET platforms that are somewhat old and with a barbaric cost or CMS such as drupal or joomla that are not up to Wordpress.

Old-fashioned and outdated content

Customers expect your website to contain the latest information about your products, services and company. When you don't have this, they may assume that you are no longer in business, or just not innovative and not ahead of the competition.

Your content should respond to the needs of your clients (or potential clients) and be updated as things change. If you have a blog, updating it at least once a week, if not more, can help you drive visitors to your website and keep search engines happy with your project.

Also, avoid putting links to your Facebook or Twitter pages if you only have few followers. People may think that your business is too small and end up not hiring it.

Hidden rates and prices

People want to know about prices, subscription fees and additional charges before or at the beginning of a process. At various sites, users had to go through complex interactions just to find basic information.

For example, they had to begin the process of purchasing a membership to find out the cost of it. Users must be able to find information before committing to a complex purchasing process. For this reason, all the information we offer on the web is free and we do not have any paid portal. Everything we make public is free and you have to value the time we invest.

Poor search results

Users turn to search by preference, as a last resort, or when they know exactly what they are looking for. In any scenario, sites need to support users by providing robust search results.

Unfortunately, site search is still a major weakness for many websites. Some sites return results that do not match user queries. Others seek only some of the content of the site but do not clearly reveal it to the user.

Badly titled results or accompanied by useless descriptions leave people guessing the content behind the link. Ads interspersed with search results surprise users and drive them away from the site.

Regularly review search logs to learn more about user search behavior and the successes and failures of your search engine. If it escapes you, we advise you to hire an SEO specialist, if it is good and you do cases you will earn many integers.

Conclusion and final words

So far you can get an idea of ​​what the main mistakes are when creating a website, but there are many others. Although most simple to solve, many go unnoticed, either by omission or carelessness with the project.

To finish, the rule to have a good website is not to make exaggerations, either in any of the aspects discussed here. Remember that what a user or client expects to find on a website is the ease of navigation and being able to find possible solutions to their problems.