The 5 biggest mistakes small business owners make with their websites

In my years of helping people build their websites and businesses, I have seen plenty of mistakes from business owners. Usually from trying to do too much work themselves! Here's 5 things to avoid, and some (hopefully) helpful tips on how to avoid them:

Not being a strategist

This is often (though not always!) new business owners, who either feel they have to do everything themselves, due to budget constraints , or feeling the need to be in control - or because they haven't learned to delegate yet!

But remember, the primary function of a business owner is to set the direction of the business. Nothing is truer than with your website. For it to truly flourish, you should set your strategy early - then work out the steps to get there. You may have to decide on where any budget gets spent here - for example, spending money early on brand, tone and voice might be a better choice than going all in a huge e-commerce site.

But trying to get your website technically right, with good copy that attracts sales, getting super images to make your sales for you, is not a one person job. Find experts early on, and your business will thank you for it later.

If you would like some help with your strategy, book in your free call with me here.

Sorry to burst your bubble - nobody cares. Your website users, your customers, are there to find out what problems you can solve for them - they are busy people and want information. The colour of your cats eyes can wait...!

Uploading Massive Images!

A big one here. If you have a content managed website that allows you to change text and images - great! But with great power comes great responsibility!!

All too often I see images that are big enough to go on a billboard, at ultra high resolutions, which obviously come with a huge cost in MegaBytes!! Imagine spending your data on one of those! Your potential customers won't thank you for wasting their data, and that's if they stick around long enough to see your slow loading image in the first place.

To avoid this, make sure you resize your images. You can do this in a standard tool - Preview in Mac can resize, and even something as basic as MSPaint. You don't need to be a photoshop whizz. For a banner image, they don't need to be any wider than 1500px, for anything else, between 800-1000px is plenty. The height will set automatically so your aspect ratio is consistent (no squishy images here!) - and marvel at how much smaller your images are.

From here, you can either use an online service like tinypng to compress your images, or if you are using wordpress, using a plugin such as Smush to compress and convert your images to more modern formats.

Convert your images to webp for better performance!

Making it all about MEEEEEEE!

This is my personal favourite (or most hated - depending on which way you look at it!). As a website owner, writing your own copy seems to make sense, after all, you are the expert in your field! However, as I said above, if you have the budget, copywriting expertise is a massive win that will pay for itself over and over again. One great example is on business about pages (or even worse, the home page!) - where owners tell us all about their hobbies and 'what makes them tick'...

Why?

Sorry to burst your bubble - nobody cares. Your website users, your customers, are there to find out what problems you can solve for them - they are busy people and want information. The colour of your cats eyes can wait...!

I can hear the other side of the argument too - 'But my business needs personality' or 'But my customers are buying me ' - while that is definitely true, you should inject your personality into your copy - a good copywriter will help you do that.

Wanting Perfection

Another one that on the surface, makes no sense... Of course we want perfection, right? Especially if you're paying someone to do it for you...

Well, yes...

But not at the expense of time.

Getting something out there, in front of customers will allow you to modify your approach, iterate quickly, experiment and make mistakes. Only through that process will you achieve perfection (or progess at least!). After that you may find you have the dilema of when you should update your website. Don't worry - we've got you covered on that one too!

This however, is not the same as just going live with rubbish :-) - finding that balance can be hard - but don't delay yourself for the sake of a couple of images or a paragraph of text, a missing product or page. Get things in front of people, and the rest will follow.

Missing CTA's

What is a CTA?!?!! CTA stands for Call to Action, and is the action you want your user to take next. Not having any is a cardinal sin, but almost as bad is having unclear, hard to find or confusing calls to action. Part of any good strategy should be deciding what you want your user to do next, and catering to that need - give them a button to click to do something, like fill out a form, buy a product, send you an email - whatever it is, make it prominent, word it clearly and make it enticing.

Conclusion

Believe me, this is not it! There are many more mistake business owners can and do make with their websites. Don't fall into the trap! If you need help with yours, book in your free call - see you there!