In our last blog, we discussed how to develop your brand voice as a business to speak to your customers. Your business’ website is one major platform to utilize and establish your brand voice; your site is the main way people learn about your business.
In our experience with designing websites, we’ve come across some common mistakes. We’re here to help you avoid these and make sure your site is functional, friendly, and engaging. There are few worse things than a bad website… well, maybe a bad cup of coffee.
Lacking Content
Many of us have encountered websites that were lacking content. Either the information is hard to find or it may not be there at all. If you don’t have content on a web page, wait to publish it until you do. It makes your website appear unfinished if your missing information or if the information you do have isn’t what people are looking for.
In order to prevent this, create content before you begin creating your website or certain pages. You want to make sure that you have content for every page on your site and that it’s clear what each page is about.
Quick tip: Struggling with where to start? Content Marketing Institute offers some content templates and checklists that can help you get the ball rolling.
Outdated Information
Speaking of creating content, making content for your website is an ongoing process. Make sure that all the information on your website is up-to-date. Go through your site monthly and make sure your links are working. Are you offering new products or services? Make sure to include those on your website.
Some common pages that people often neglect are the About Us page, Contact page, and Blog page. One way to prevent outdated information is to have one person who has a weekly task of checking your site’s content.
Quick Tip: Do you have a website page about your team and employees? Make sure everyone is on there. Get creative with your About page. One way to do this is tell your business’ story. How did you start? What drives you as a business?
We recently updated our About page to include Pinterest boards about each of us here at the Designflair team. It’s a way for our clients and future clients to learn more about us as individuals and it adds a visual element to a page that already had text content. It leads people to our Pinterest account, which we keep updated with pins on branding, marketing, and design.
Harmful, Quick Tactics
Don’t do something just to do it – it will hurt your branding and your business. One example is writing unhelpful blog posts just to get content on your site. This is where people tend to use shady keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing may increase traffic to your site, but once people arrive they are likely to realize that your blog isn’t actually informative. Marketing experts over at Hubspot wrote a brilliant and hilarious post, How to Write a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Blog Post. Reading through this article will help you know what to avoid when writing for your blog.
Another example is putting information on your page just to get it out there. There may be times when you have an urgent message that needs to go out to your clients and customers, however quickly posting it on your site without considering the layout and design is dangerous. Putting word content on your website, blog, or social media accounts without being fine-tuned will look unprofessional and unfinished.
Quick Tip: Before you publish any content, get an extra pair of eyes to look over the work. It’s worth the extra time of proofreading to catch any mistakes before your content goes live. Take time to ensure the content you are creating is consistent with your branding, helps your clients, and is informative.
Don’t lose credibility for your business by making these common web mistakes. What types of errors have you encountered when surfing the web? Let us know if there are any common mistakes out there that we missed.
Limited Marketing Special
For the next 2 weeks (until 12/18/15), we are offering end of year marketing packages. We’re eager to help our clients succeed through effective marketing! Commit to investing in your business now with our holiday packages and choose to:
- – Schedule your strategy session immediately
- – Schedule to start a plan to start in the new year
Contact us by December 18th to receive this marketing package deal!
