What are 5 top mistakes made when launching a website?
These days, with billions of domain names registered, with a large majority directing to websites, it’s largely important that your online presence is as good as it can be.
Here, we look into the top 5 mistakes made when launching a website.
Mistake #1 – Not having a Responsive Website Design
Websites are now accessed on multiple devices, like smartphones and tablets, so therefore need to be dynamic and responsive in design.
The term “Responsive Design” refers to the process of having your website designed in a way where it is viewable on all devices. Websites which are responsive will scale down to fit evenly on mobiles and tablets. Websites which aren’t built to be responsive won’t scale down to fit evenly and if viewed on a phone or tablet, the viewer will be forever scrolling across horizontally to read.
If your site isn’t responsive, sometimes when viewed on a smaller device, a large aspect of the site (ie: the home page banner) that looks great on your computer might be the only thing to load on the smaller device.
It is now believed that more people use their mobile to search through Google, rather than their laptops or computers. In saying this, if your website is not optimised, this can be a huge loss to your business and revenue.
Mistake #2 – Not displaying Social Media Links on your website
With the popularity of social media and how important it is to promoting business, you need to ensure that your social media links are visible on your website, so that your customer base can like and/ or share your social media posts to their friends, which will promote your business at no cost to you.
Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are quite important to have links to, as these platforms usually drive traffic to your website, since these are updated more than your website, unless you have a blog of course and regularly keep it updated.
Mistake #3 – Using poor quality images or images that are too large
Too often than not, websites often contain poor quality images, or images that are too large and take too long to load. These may be banner images, images throughout content pages or product images.
If you don’t have quality images to use and only have old photos that have been laying around for years which have been scanned into your computer to use, then it’s probably time to either take new photos or source some new images. Sites like iStock Photo or DepositPhotos are the way to go these days, as poor quality images can often deter people away from your website.
If you do go along the lines of purchasing images, be sure to resize these to the size you need them. Otherwise they will be forever loading for viewers. You can use a free online photo editing software like Pixlr if you don’t have an image resizer.
Another mistake people can make when it comes to images is using photos from Google. This can cost you thousands due to copyright if you use images without permission.
Mistake #4 – Not working on your Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making your website search engine friendly, to assist the movement of your website on Google.
At Forerunner, we use the content management system, WordPress. One of the best things about WordPress is that you have a lot of control over SEO within the CMS. You can also obtain plugins to enhance your SEO.
At bare minimum, it’s good practice to go through each page on your website through WordPress and enter in a “Focus Keyword” for each page, change the “SEO Title”, the “URL Slug” (for search engine friendly URLs) and the “Meta Description”. These all sit behind pages to assist in Google ranking. When uploading images to your site, you should be entering in an “Image Title”, “Image Caption”, “Alt Text” and a “Description”. These all sit behind images to enhance viewing on Google. Especially with Google Images being a way a lot of people search these days.
Mistake #5 – Not checking links before launching
Have you ever come across links or pages that don’t link up quite right or look right either?
Unfortunately, this is a common mistake.
Before launching, we can’t stress enough to check each page and every link on your website across all your browsers and mobiles. A lot of the time, different browsers will display things quite differently. This will ensure things are working as they should be.
