Top 5 mistakes to avoid when creating your website

Creating a website is a crucial step for any company or individual wishing to establish an online presence. However, even in today’s digital age, it’s easy to make some common mistakes that can undermine the effectiveness and credibility of your website. In this article, we’ll explore the top five mistakes to avoid when creating your website.

1. Ignore planning

Neglecting to plan your website carefully is a recipe for online disaster. Before diving into design, and before even touching a line of code, it’s essential to clearly define your objectives. What results do you want to achieve with your website? Who is your target audience?

Draw up a detailed plan for your website’s pages, the features needed and the navigation structure. Think of it as drawing up the plans for a building before construction. This ensures that every element of your website has a clear purpose, and will save you unnecessary headaches in the long run.

Examples of best practice:

• Draw up a website organisation chart to visualise the structure.
• Identify the main pages: Home, About, Services, Contact, etc.
• Map the user journey, from arrival to conversion.

For example, if you run an online store, your plan should include pages for products, detailed descriptions, the shopping cart, and the checkout process. By clearly identifying these elements from the outset, you avoid costly mistakes along the way.

2. Neglecting responsiveness (mobile-friendly)

In today’s digital landscape, your website needs to run smoothly on all screens, from smartphones to desktops. Today, the majority of Internet users browse the web via their smartphones and tablets. Ignoring the importance of your website’s responsiveness will make you risk losing valuable visitors. Make sure your website is optimised for flawless display on all screen sizes. Responsiveness is no longer an option, it’s a necessity when creating a website.

Use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap to ensure responsiveness. Test your website on several devices and browsers to ensure that it displays correctly everywhere. Opt also for images adapted to various resolutions, to avoid excessive loading times and ensure a fast, pleasant user experience.

Imagine a cooking website. Visitors should be able to view recipes while in the kitchen with their tablet or phone, while exploring cooking tips in more detail on their desktop computer. Responsive design ensures a consistent user experience, whatever the device.

3. Inconsistent and poor content

Content is king, even in web design. Nothing turns visitors off faster than incoherent, poorly structured or uninteresting content. Invest time in creating content that is relevant, informative, of high quality and well presented.

Use clear, concise language to allow users to understand easily. Incorporate relevant visuals to illustrate your points and break up the text. You can imagine your website as a captivating book, where every paragraph is a page turned with anticipation by your visitors. Be careful to avoid spelling and grammatical errors, as they can seriously compromise your website’s credibility.

For example, if you run a travel blog, every article should be well structured, with high-quality photos and engaging descriptions. Readers should feel transported to each destination you describe.

4. Ignoring search engine optimization (SEO)

The most beautiful website in the world is useless if it isn’t visible on search engines. SEO is the lighthouse that guides visitors to your website in the ocean of the web, and neglecting search engine optimization can relegate your website to the bottom of the search results.

Carry out thorough research into the keywords relevant to your industry and integrate them strategically into your content. Optimise your pages’ title tags, meta descriptions and URLs to make them search-engine friendly. A well-optimised website is like a compass that directs users to your valuable content.

Let’s take the example of a fitness advice website. By performing a keyword search, you can identify that “Weight training exercises for beginners” is a common query. You can then create an article with this title and integrate other related keywords to improve your website’s visibility in search results.

5. Lack of clarity in the Call To Action

Every page on your website should have a clear objective, supported by a convincing call to action (CTA). Whether it’s to encourage visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, make a purchase or contact you, the call to action must be clearly visible and concisely worded. A lack of clarity in this crucial step can lead to a drop in conversions.

Use clear, punchy CTAs, such as “Sign up now” or “Buy now”, to guide your visitors to the next step. Place these CTAs judiciously on your pages, highlighting them at the end of your blog posts, on your home page or at other strategic points.

Imagine a newsletter subscription website. On every page, a well-designed CTA invites visitors to sign up for the latest news and tips. The CTA is visually distinctive and stands out to encourage conversions.

Conclusion

Creating a successful website requires meticulous attention to detail and a thorough understanding of your goals and audience. Avoiding these five common mistakes – insufficient planning, lack of responsiveness, poor content, sloppy SEO and unclear calls to action – will get you started on the right path towards building a solid online presence. Remember, your website is often the first impression people have of you online, so make it memorable, professional and effective.

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ProContact is more than a contact centre. Thanks to trained, qualified, hand-picked and multilingual agents, we enable the companies that choose us to gain credibility and above all to satisfy their customers, regardless of the situation and in complete transparency.

Outsourcing has become a tangible and concrete business strategy for the development of the company. To find out more about our services, for a quality partnership, click on our contact form, send us an e-mail or call us on (+33) 1 84 76 24 03.