Wade Armstrong

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Top 6 Small Business Web Site Mistakes

Posted Friday October 5, 2007 in Entrepreneurship

In a former life, I designed Web sites for a living — I still do a bit of consulting here and there. For someone starting a new business, having a great Web site can make a big difference. But it’s not always clear how to make a site that really sells online. Here are some common mistakes that companies of all sizes make on their Web sites, as well as some tips and tools you can use to make sure these mistakes don’t appear on your site.

1. Sound

The very first commandment of good Web site design is “fulfill your customers’ needs.” Sound can help your customers learn and carry out tasks — but it can also disrupt. Think of the officeworker in a cubicle whose computer suddenly starts playing your music or pitch as they visit your site. Did you just make them look unprofessional to their colleagues? Rat them out to their boss as a slacker? Worst of all, did you make them close the browser window with your site in it, to make the sound go away? Only play sound when your user specifically requests it. That way, your demos and podcasts will stand out to potential customers as useful features, not inconveniences.

2. Internet Explorer-Only Sites

Fortunately, this mistake is less common than it used to be. With the rise of Firefox and Safari as alternative browsers, Web designers less often build sites that only work in IE on Windows and more often write code that works across a wide variety of Web browsers. That’s good, because you never know what browser your potential customer will be using. Make sure that your site works well in all common browsers by using standards-compliant design. If you aren’t sure how well your site works, check using Browsercam, a service that shows your site in a wide variety of browsers.

If your developers are using the hot new effects called AJAX — which change pages dynamically as your customers use your site, rather than requiring your customers to wait as a new page loads for every action they take — make sure that these developers are using AJAX code that works in most common browsers and degrades gracefully in browsers that don’t support it. There are a variety of high-quality toolkits available that do just that.

3. No Analytics

So how are your pages doing? Who’s visiting? Are you getting more visitors or less than before? Are people who got your brochure visiting your site? Are the coupons you put out working? Do you know? You should.

Even if you’re not going to update your site, you shouldn’t just let it sit there. Use it to get information on your customers. What products or services are they looking at? What pages are they arriving at, and after what pages do they leave your site? Log analysis software lets you answer that question. There are lots of powerful options for this kind of software, but if you’re just starting out you may find that the free Google Analytics work well enough for you.

If you have a shopping cart on your site, the shopping cart software may also tell you what people are doing and where they’re going. Great! Check out the reports to see which products get the most views. Get more value by assigning unique codes to the coupons you give out at different locations — and analyze your coupon use to see which ones get the best response. You can learn about your customers from your site!

4. No On-Page SEO

Search Engine Optimization — getting your site at the top of search results so that your customers can find you — is a lot of work and, frankly, a bit of a black art. But being a top result can bring big business results. There are two kinds of search engine optimization (SEO): on-page and off-page. On-page SEO refers to optimizations you make on your site, while off-page SEO refers to optimizations others make on their sites that makes your site rank higher (getting links on other sites is a good example of off-page SEO).

You are in control of changes on your own page; make them. Standards-compliant design doesn’t just help users see you better, it helps search engines too, so a standards-compliant site will show up higher in search results. Another powerful took is good writing — use the words in your copy that your customers will use when they search for sites like yours. Use clear headlines on all pages, using the same keywords. If you’re using Flash or lots of images, make sure that your developers use the techniques available to make these tools search-engine friendly.

5. Design by Vice President

This is a mistake a lot of big companies make — don’t make it too! Have you ever visited a Web site that seemed to have a button for every division on the home page, but didn’t help you accomplish your goals? That’s design by Vice President. You can almost imagine each VP asking “where’s the button for my division?” when they had a meeting to look at their new site. But of course a customer rarely cares about divisions — they care about problem solutions. Make your site about solving specific problems, not about respecting specific boundaries within your organization. Your customers will love you.

6. Generic Look

It’s tempting to keep costs down on your new site by buying a design template and using stock photography; I recommend against it. Your site needs to be about you. If you put your biggest competitor’s logo at the top of the page, would your site fit them as well as it fits you? If so, then how can your customer keep you straight? How can you make a unique and lasting impression? Instead, spend a little more to get a design that matches your logo colors, or to take a few photos of your products or people. The result will be a site that speaks about you — and that’s key to selling.

Your small business’s Web site can help get it going — or be a waste of time and money. By staying clear of these six common mistakes, you can get a lot more bang for your buck and sell more effectively online.