Most organisations with an online presence that don’t employ a professional and experienced web development partner make a plethora of mistakes that primarily begin with style over substance.

This begins with the planning stage, but many companies fail to deliver a successful web presence in the deployment phase, making common mistakes that might easily be avoided if highlighted up-front.

Some of the things to bear in mind include:

1. Don’t employ non-text graphics on your home page

The home page is like an index in a book and users should quickly see what the site contains. Having a front cover on your website, however, is wrong. It penalises your site with users and the search engines. Straight brand building websites are the exception but they are few and far between and tend to be product-focused. Graphic-driven website covers keep the content hidden from search engines. If the search engine cannot find any text on which to evaluate your site it cannot be added to the database and will therefore not direct anyone to your site.

2. Correctly identify your audience

Be honest about your target market. Creating a website for the wrong people is one of the most common mistakes that companies make. If you incorrectly identify your target viewers up front, then the design and content of the site are going to be wasted and your desired viewers may event resent your business.

3. Measure investment versus return

The website is primarily used as a marketing tool and as such it should be generating income for the business. Measuring the investment on return will satisfy business principles and ensure that the appropriate budget is allocated. Measuring your investment and your return will also stop you from developing a R3-million brochure-ware website.

4. Apply usability rules

The look and feel of the website should follow common usability rules and remain true to the company’s brand. So don’t make the website look like a brochure when it should be like a book, for example.

There are many different usability rules primarily governed by “simpler is better”. First of all, a good impression is imperative with a clean design and the right content to lead customers or users through the site. Using black text on a white background is comforting for users when your site contains a fair amount of content for them to peruse. Simple, intuitive navigation is imperative. Navigation should also not be purely button-driven. Testing the site, clicking on each link, testing different screen resolutions and ensuring that load times are not excessive for various connection speeds is imperative.

Search engines need to read all the links associated with a page if they are to properly catalogue it and give it the prominence it deserves, something they cannot do if the link is a graphic.

5. Do not mimic the company’s internal structure

Because the company may have three divisions structured around sales, service and administration does not mean that the customers want to see this mimicked on the website. They may prefer a website that integrates all three around a specific product or service. This depends on the business and its customers and makes ascertaining the correct audience upfront all the more critical.

6. Remove all jargon

Jargon only serves to confuse customers and drives them away. Making the text clear, concise and informative based on a customer’s needs is the best way to achieve success. Removing jargon also means that your website will cut to the chase to meet real customer needs.

7. Ensure that useful information is no more than three clicks from the home page

Forcing customers or users to keep clicking through reams of links is a quick way to get them to click off your site. Making information accessible is very important.

8. Limit your risk

Rolling the website out in phases delivers quick wins. It also allows you to obtain feedback from users and in a truly fortuitous scenario, your customers. Developing an entire website over four years and deploying it only to discover that the users hate it means lengthy and costly redevelopment. Continually evolving sites are the most successful with incremental innovation driven by constant user feedback.

Custom development of complex systems is not a great idea. The probability that intricate projects will fail is high. Avoid using single developers to custom-code your website. There are buses out there with their name on, which could leave you up the creek without a paddle.

Carefully evaluate whether or not your business can host the site itself or should employ a service provider. This means you must investigate expected initial usage and project future usage scenarios. If your business hosts its own site, ask yourself if you have the skills to maintain 24x7 availability and whether or not this is necessary. Project management is key to reducing risk and can often be best supplied by a third-party to co-ordinate the various stakeholders.

9. Change management

Most people don’t do change management from the people point of view. As with all IT systems, there are people who resist change and the earlier you get them involved in the project, the better it will fare. One way of achieving this is having champions from each department involved in the website. Training people to use the website effectively is essential. Part of the process can include writing rewards for using it into their contracts.

10. Service providers

Service providers can add a great deal of value to a website development project. Picking a service provider can be tricky. What criteria can you use to evaluate your choice? Web developers should not be artists. You are tasking them with a business project. Ensuring that the developers are not precious about their design is critical. They should listen to your business needs and deliver against those, applying appropriate technology.

This can be clearly ascertained in the upfront planning stages. The provider should understand all aspects of the development, from the back-end to the front-end and the content generation.

Building the site on a content management system is highly recommended. Building a static website is crazy since it requires each and every page to be separately built and, more importantly, maintained.

There will be design elements that must be created, such as graphics, the site will need to be structured and the base pages built with a little programming, regardless of a policy to use only packaged software solutions. It goes without saying that the service provider should be able to supply all of this with the necessary technical skills but should primarily deliver against business needs.

Working with a professional partner, while in many cases appears to be costly up-front, will ensure that you avoid these common web development blunders.

An article from Marketing web