Having A New Website Built? Here Are 5 Common Mistakes To Avoid

It never ceases to amaze me how often I see basic mistakes made at the website build stage, that could have been easily avoided had the client had a little information at their disposal, that they could have used when communicating with their selected web design company. Unfortunately this is not the case and therefore avoidable mistakes are made.

Here are a 5 common mistakes to be aware of when commissioning a website build:

1. The first point to address is your domain name. Don't be tempted to just purchase the first available, snazzy sounding name, but consider using a name with an important, relevant keyword in it. Words can be separated by hyphens but not by underscores. For example, if your company sells gold teapots, the domain names goldteapots.com or gold-teapots.com would be fine, whereas gold_teapots.com would not be. By incorporating one of your important keywords in your domain name, you will be gaining a slight advantage with Google and the other search engines. Make sure you get this right before you do anything else as you certainly won't want to change your domain name at a later stage.

2. Time after time I chat to people who've made a typical and common mistake when having a new website built. This classic mistake is to spend lots of time writing your website copy before any important keyword research has been done. The reason you will want to research your important keywords and their search potential before writing your copy, is that you will want to stitch your important key phrases naturally into your copy as you write it. Do it the wrong way round and you will end up having to write your copy again. Any decent web building company should do this keyword research for you, and provided a copywriting service should you need it.

3. Check that your web pages will have what is known as friendly URLs. A friendly URL is the type of website page address that Google will and more happily index in their search engines. In case you are unaware what an unfriendly URL might look like, it will look something like this: page_about.php?catID=4258. This complicated URL would have been dynamically generated, probably by a content management system. A URL that is friendly will be like this: aboutus.php. You should definitely not be afraid to check with your website builders that you will indeed have friendly URLs.

4. Another sloppy mistake that should be so easily avoided is when a website looks perfect on one browser and awful on others. This is because different website browsers render/display websites differently and therefore not only should your finished site be checked on as many browsers as possible, but also checked on a PC and a Mac of different screen resolutions. Be definite to do this prior to signing your project off.

5. Whilst you may not have paid your web design company for search engine optimisation services, it is my opinion that the website build should be search engine friendly. I can't believe how often the vital title and description tags are left blank at the build stage, resulting in your website losing out on some valuable search engine gains. Take the meta description tag for example, if this tag is left blank on any page, when a link to this page is shown in the search engine ranking results you will not have any control over the descriptive text next to your link. Google will randomly choose any text from the page, which results in you missing out on what can be seen as a valuable call to action.

So there are 5 common mistakes often made when undertaking a website build. You should not be afraid to communicate with your selected website design company to make sure that none of these silly mistakes occur.