Let’s be real for a second. Creating and maintaining your business’ website can be overwhelming. We know that all too well - we desperately need to update ours but can’t seem to find the time.

Between selecting compelling images, choosing tool integrations, and writing catchy one-liners, we understand the difficulty of developing a strong company website. That’s why we want to help you, one small business to another.

At Solomoto, we are website building experts. Along with our all-in-one online management platform, we offer an intuitive website builder where you can easily create your website using our professionally made templates and easy drag and drop features.

Although easy, cheap, and convenient for small business owners like yourself, we’ve noticed several common mistakes that people make when building their own websites. Our team has developed this list to help you on your website creation journey.

Here are the 15 most common mistakes when creating your business website:

1. You don’t plan out your website...or not enough
Would you start a business without having a thought out business plan, values, objectives, and goals? Well, you should think about your website in the same light.

Your website is the extension of your business into the online world.

Without developing a roadmap and solid plan of what your business wants to get out of its website and what you want your users to get from your website, you’ll never create a successful website.

But what do you need to make sure your website has or shows? Simply put, your website should show your business’ personality, message, and unique insight, product, or service.

These messages can be displayed in all forms of media including the very color or layout of your website. It’s important to make sure your website’s look and feel matches what your business stands for. Otherwise, your customers will get mixed messages and not trust your business.

2. You only focus on selling your products or services
This mistake is by far the most common when it comes to small and medium sized businesses. Yes, it is true that your website should exist to sell your business’ products or services. But, if it only lists your company’s features, what differentiates your business from the hundreds of others selling the same things?

What makes your business different?

You need to show your target audience why your business is different from competitors and why your business is better. This in the business world is known as a company’s unique selling proposition, it’s what makes your business appeal to customers beyond the actual product or service.

Your unique insight or selling proposition can tie into your business’ personality, message, or company values.

3. You don’t have a call to action
This is another common error made by small businesses. Most businesses put in a ton of effort to bring potential customers to their website. And, when they finally get customers to their website, they forget to follow through and persuade the customer to purchase their product or service.

You fell short of your goal, just like in this cheesy stock photo.

What your business is missing is a call to action. Whether it’s a purchase, lead, subscription, or further engagement, you need to orient your website visitors in the right direction and give them the momentum to move forward.

What is the right direction? Whatever your business wants to get out of its website. This could mean getting more sales or purchases. Remember, no matter how appealing your website looks, it will mean nothing if you don’t seal the deal by giving your audience a decisive call to action.

A simple and straightforward next step to grow your relationship with the customer and achieve your business goals.

4. You don’t update or include your contact details
Including your contact details and general business information seems like something you will automatically add to your website. But what about when those details change? Will you remember to update your website with new contact information?

This new information can be anything from a business email, phone number, business addresses, or individual team members and their details. Having your business’ contact information clearly displayed and updated is crucial for building customer engagement and trust.

Put simply, without the correct contact details, your customers cannot communicate with your business effectively and they will decide to invest in one of your competitors.

5. Your website is not mobile responsive
Everyday, more people become dependent on their smartphones and turn to them instead of their computers. Because of this switch in how media is consumed, your business needs to make sure its website is up to date and mobile responsive or friendly.

That way, your website can fit to any size screen to make navigation and viewing easy for customers on all devices. You can also make your device mobile responsive by increasing the loading speed and display.

Remember: your website will be navigated differently on a mobile phone compared to a computer. Make sure that navigation is easy on both devices by testing your website on different sized devices and requesting feedback from customers.

6. Your website is hard to navigate
Another common mistake is that your website is hard to navigate. This could mean that there are not enough pages or too many. Or, the layout is hard to understand because everything is too cramped or spread out.

A bad layout can feel overwhelming to your customers. Like an impossible maze.

If a visitor becomes lost, you are bound to lose them as a potential customer. This is unacceptable as a business and is completely avoidable. Remember to have a clearly visible navigation bar that can be seen on any size. Also, make sure that your website’s content and layout follows a logical format that is easier for visitors to understand.

7. Not having a company blog
This mistake is more for medium sized businesses or startups rather than your everyday mom and pop shop. Regardless, blogs can help any business succeed and more easily advertise your business’ personality to its customers.

Blogs are a great way to differentiate your business from competitors, create relationships between your business and audience, show off your expertise in a field, and have fun. There are tons of reasons why your company should have a blog on its website.

A blog done right can bring large amounts of traffic to your website, increase your online and social media presence, and give your brand and company credibility. To do so, your blog should have regular scheduled updates and well written, relevant content.

8. Using other people’s content
While stealing or purchasing other people’s content may seem easier to keep your website fresh, it will hurt your business in the long run. We think it’s pretty obvious why you shouldn’t steal or plagiarize other people’s work to benefit your business. Not only does it make your business look bad but it is doing a disservice to the original creator of that content. Remember, content includes everything from blog articles, posts, images, and videos.

As for purchasing content from ghost writers or stock photo sites, this may keep your business on the good side of the law, but you might run into a problem down the line where you don’t have a business message, or don’t reinforce it with these articles.

By having other people’s content represent your business, it probably won’t be tailored to your specific audience. To maximize your relationship and authenticity with your audience, it’s important that your business writes its own blog articles, posts, and updates, so your audience can learn about YOU, not someone else.

9. Using poor quality images
We have all seen this before. You click onto a website and you see low quality images that are blurry or pixelated, and looks like a 5-year old took the photo with their eyes closed. Images are crucial, especially on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram, to draw viewers in and establish how your audience perceives your business.

You want your business to have a professional, high-quality feel. The easiest way to accomplish this is through the images you put on your website. Photos should be crisp and not blurry. They should draw the viewer in whether because of its colors, composition, or subject.

Photos of your business’ product, team, and services should be extremely high quality. We highly recommend you take these photos with a professional camera or hire an experienced photographer to ensure that your business is represented in the best light for your audience.

10. Using cheesy stock photos
This is another type of poor quality photo that a lot of businesses make the mistake of using because it appears to be high quality. Yep, the obvious cheesy stock photo.

What part of this photo looks real? None of it? This photo might be a high quality photo, but it is useless for your business. Why? There’s nothing original or special about it!

Where’s your business personality? Trust us, don’t fill your website with cliche stock photos. It will not end well!

11. Using small or unreadable font
You have a very limited amount of time to get your point across to site visitors. If you make them work hard by making your font small or unreadable, they will leave. People will leave websites very quickly if they are frustrated or confused by any part of it, especially if they can’t read what you are writing!

Few words, clean font type, and a large font size go a long way in keeping your visitors engaged.

Remember, the bigger your text, the better. Make sure your font is a good color and style that’s easy to read. Stay away from harsh neon colors and small, cursive fonts. Most companies even stay away from serif fonts because sans-serif appears cleaner and easier to read.

12. Too few or too many colors
Again, don’t make it difficult for people to decipher your business message or navigate your website. If you have too few or too many colors, your website will get become hard to navigate, look unprofessional, and have too much or little going on.

A good idea is to first create your business’ logo and use the colors in your logo as your website’s color pallette. Your color scheme should be consistent to solidify your branding. A website’s color scheme should consist of at least three primary colors and one to two secondary colors.

13. Not having social media integration
A great thing about the Internet is being able to increase your business’ online presence by integrating multiple platforms together. Each of these platforms, offers your audience a new way to engage with your company. Some of the biggest platforms are social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

It’s crucial to connect your website to your business’ social media pages so your customers can easily learn more about your business and see its recent activity. You can also take this one step further by enabling share buttons so your audience can share your blog posts or website to their followers.

You can see how on the bottom of our blog posts we have the links to our social media pages on the left and sharing buttons on the right. This way, our customers can easily visit all our pages.

14. You have not optimized your website
Your website may look great, it’s easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing, and has a logical format to it. This all does not matter if you haven’t considered the SEO for your website.

Without proper SEO, your website will become lost in the Google Sea from the very beginning. SEO is the foundation of your business’ searchability. It is critical for your business to be found by customers and search engines.

15. Your website’s loading speed is too slow
Another important issue that makes your beautiful website obsolete if done incorrectly is your loading speed. In a world where everything is instantaneous, waiting a few seconds can seem like an eternity to some.

According to Google, it takes the average mobile landing page 22 seconds to fully load. Don’t let this number fool you. Over 50% of people will leave a mobile page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

Depending on your website’s loading speed, there’s a high possibility that your users won’t wait, and they will instead become your competitor’s users. Look into what images and animations are being used on your website’s home page and determine if those can be optimized or redesigned to shorten the time needed for your website to load.

Best of luck,

The Solomoto Team

P.S. What are the biggest struggles you are having with your current marketing strategy right now? Share them with us in *the comments below* or get in touch with one of our team members over Facebook or Twitter, and we will do our best to help!

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