Kill Your Website without Web Design Planning

The success or failure of your website is not determined by how good your web designer is or how skilled you are at website marketing – it is in fact determined well before your website is written. Only 5% of websites will ever appear on page 1 or page 2 of search engines for their desired keywords hence try to avoid these mistakes before you begin writing your website:

(Please see: Top 60 Web Design Mistakes of 2009 for further information & resources)

1 – Lack of Keyword Research – This is a cardinal sin – how can you attempt to write a website without knowing what your visitor’s search for? Getting this wrong will mean that you will not rank well for the best terms, hence you will loose out on valuable organic traffic. There are many free keyword research tools at your disposal – use them!

2 – Lack of Competitor Research – without competitor research you won’t know whether your page 1 competitors have 30 or 30,000 backlinks, and you won’t know if their websites have 3 or 300 pages. The term ‘mortgage’ has 189 million pages listed in Google – moneysupermarket.com who are usually number 1 has 306,000 backlinks – hence it would be unrealistic for anyone other than a team of professional SEMs to compete. Simple research takes minutes and could save months of wasted effort and wasted cash.

3 – Same as the Next Guy – By making your website the same as everyone else you are not telling your visitor what’s different, hence you are setting your website for failure. Plan to be different and insure you convey your differences quickly – think about improving your: content, visitor experience, site navigation & any special offers you might have when planning your website – making this effort in the planning stage really pays dividend later

4 – Lack of Good Content – fail on this point & it doesn’t matter what else you have got right – many visitors use search engines to resolve a problem: this could be: find a product, find a supplier, find a service provider etc – hence answer your visitors immediate question & provide plenty of supporting content. The more thoughtful you are with your content the more likely your visitors will turn into business

5 – Inadequate Page Planning – it’s like the old saying: ‘fail to prepare – prepare to fail’ – inadequate page planning will inevitably result in lower rankings. Use well researched keywords in: titles, descriptions, headings, footers, menu text, link text, paragraphs, page names & directories. Keep your layouts consistent & your menus easy to follow. If you have the necessary skills prepare to write your website in scripting language such as ASP/PHP for greater control of layout & functionality & consider building in CMS so pages can be added or removed easily.

6 – No Marketing Plan – you can create the greatest website in the world & still fail through failing to plan your marketing – you must decide weather to do this yourself or pay for this be done. This decision should be based on the mountain or molehill of link building that you will have to do, your marketing skill level & the amount of time you have to spare – competitor research will give you all the information you need to make this decision. If you don’t plan for website marketing then it likely that you won’t do any and still fail

7 – Cheap Hosting Overseas – unless your site is geared more to international traffic rather than local or national then hosting overseas is a bad idea. Cheap overseas hosting will lead to longer load times & will affect your ranking in search engines. Plan to host your website in your home country – use a fast well recommended hosting service with 24/7 support – be sure to check the hosts IP address to insure the servers really are based where the host claims they are. Many search engines today use Geo Targeting in some manner.

8 – Poor use of Colours – you have approximately 3 seconds to make your first impression hence insure your colour scheme is perfect for your website & is unlikely to offend your visitors. Avoid luminous colour schemes & take care when designing websites geared for other countries as certain colours have major cultural significance. Avoid using any more than 3 colours in your scheme & insure these are web safe & matched well. Poor planning in this area is likely to make your website look amateur.

9 – Strange Fonts – consider that not all of us have perfect vision hence try not to make your visitors strain to read your content – use basic fonts such as Helvetica or Arial. Poor use of fonts is a certain way of your website becoming a victim of the back button. There are nor laws in place in a few countries that govern the use of text within websites – I haven’t heard of anyone being sued yet, but I’m sure someone will tell me otherwise.

10 – Selecting your URL & TLD – wherever possible choose a domain that contains your researched keywords then select the correct domain suffix (TLD) – use .co.uk for a UK company .com for e-commerce – you will have trouble indexing an Indian domain (eg .co.in) in the UK . Here are come common UK domain suffixes:

.com – ecommerce website

.co.uk – uk corporate website

.net – large network website – often used by hosting companies.

.biz – for business-to-business websites

.org.uk – group, charity or organisation

.info – informational sites – non e-commerce

.name – for an individual or organization

.ltd – for ltd company