How to Kill your Website Before Web Design

Websites can fail even before a single line of code is ever written. The success or failure of your website will very much depend on the competence or incompetence – of your web designer & how dedicated or lame they are in preparing your website for your market. 95% of sites will never make page 1 or page 2 of SERPs. Here are the worst web design planning mistakes in order:

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

1 – No Keyword Research – Attempting to write a website without keyword research is effectively going blind. Good keyword research usually reveals many surprises and potential niche keywords that could be used to drive traffic. Poor use of keywords is the number 1 reason for website failure and it’s totally avoidable through the use of keyword research tools – many of which are free to use.

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 – Poor Content Quality – if you have done your competitor research then you will know how much quality content you have to write to match your competitors. Both quality & quantity of text content is important – paragraphs should be no more than a few lines long, headings should contain your researched keywords. Planning this in advance will help improve your website ranking & conversion rates.

5 – No Page Planning – lack of page planning will inevitably result in lower search engine ranking. Insure that you use well researched keywords in: page names, directory names, titles, descriptions, headings, footers, menu text, link text & your paragraphs. Your menus should be easy to follow and your important headings should be high up the page. Keep your page layouts consistent and if you are writing a large website use scripting language such as ASP or PHP. Wherever possible build CMS so pages can be added or removed easily.

6 – No Plan for Marketing – most of us by now know that the myth of ‘write a website & the visitors will come’ is not true. The objective for most websites should be to aim for Page1 or Page2 of search engines. By doing your competitor research you will know how big a hill you have to climb un order to match/beat the competition. Being unrealistic with the time/budget for this task will make even the best website fail.

7 – Poor Choice of Hosting – cheap hosting deals overseas may not necessarily be good for your website as many search engines today use ‘Geo Targeting’ in some manner in their ranking algorithms and you visitors may find your website slower than your competitors. Where possible use host with servers located in your home country & look at live review sites before making a decision. If your site is geared for high traffic and/or overseas trade then use a dedicated server and insure you host has good peering agreements with the countries that you are likely to do business with. Always check your host’s IP address to insure the servers really are based where the host claims they are.

8 – Poor Colour Choice – your website is not the place to express yourself – you have less than 3 seconds to make your first impression – hence choose a colour scheme that is perfect for your website – try colour matching your photos/logos/artwork & avoid drab/luminous colours. Take care when designing websites geared for other countries as certain colours have cultural significance & insure that your colours are web safe. Poor planning in this area is will make your website look amateur.

9 – Choosing Strange Fonts – could make your site hard to read especially for people with poor vision. Wherever possible use basic fonts such as Arial & Helvetica. If you must use alternative fonts insure the text is large enough, clear & it matches your website theme.

10 – Website Name & Suffix – choose a domain that contains your keywords & select the correct domain suffix (top level domain) – whilst using your keywords in your domain is not essential, it helps with towards your page ranking. Choosing the wrong suffix will not help you achieve listings in the right territory. Common UK TLD’s:

.com – ecommerce or commercial website (UK &/or International)

.co.uk – uk corporate website

.net – often used by web hosts – large network

.biz – for business-to-business websites

.org.uk – organisation, group or charity

.info – informational site .name – usually used for individuals

.name – for an individual or group

.ltd.uk – UK ltd company