Misconceptions about building a website

There are some, let say, misconceptions about building and maintaining a website that often roam around and get repeated over and over again by many designers. They usually leave a person that was creating the site with a lot of time lost and empty wallet but most of all the results might not be there! 

In other words there might be a major lack of visitors and finally they are the reason why we built the site in the first place. 

The website idea and design must be unique

One of the biggest misconceptions is that the site design must be unique. Like any other item we posses, such as a car, a laptop or a pen, the site we are going to build doesn’t have to be a totally unique idea or layout or even uniquely visually presented. 

 

Your site should probably differentiate from another site of a similar business but only enough to be distinguishedfrom it; do not create a unique visual appearance only because you think that you have to be different. Actually it is a good idea to stick to some already imposed web conventions or standards, let say a lawyer’s office or a university can often be represented with a set of grayish or brownish colors and layout sets, while for instance a site that offers food related products or information will mostly be designed with more naturally vivid colors (sky blue, olive green etc..).

Visual appearance is crucial for customer satisfaction

Although we all want to create a visually appealing website, that criteria should not be the priority (except perhaps in the entertainment business).

Having a beautiful website is great, but interesting content and information, supported by easy-to-navigate menus or a tour guide will produce much better results.

Think of the most famous websites in the World and their design for a second. Google, E-bay and others have a lack of the visual presentation (no graphics, clips, etc) but they attract many people and have great success. That is because of easy-to-manage principle; they guide visitors quickly and clearly to the products they are looking for. So when designing a website, have in mind that you should first develop properly the content before implementing other parts, such as graphics or animation.

Building a site is always expensive

Although building a website can be very expensive, it doesn’t have to be.

There are many web designers that might try to use the lack of your knowledge and charge extra but you don’t have to fall for that. A simpler site is easy to design at home, or pay a small amount of money to purchase a template from one of many Internet web design companies.

Make sure that you define your budget before starting up and, if not able to do it yourself, find a web or graphic designer who can deal with that budget. Shop around, there are plenty of choices.

It's my site and I can do all by myself

 In theory this as a true statement but in reality building a website, specially a complex one, will probably take too much.

 It is always a good idea to have some help, let say content and graphics of your site are two different things. While you can build a layout and have some content inserted by yourself, doing the same with the entire graphic visualization of your site will consume a lot of time. Beside that there are other parts of a successful website or web business, such as the content checking, copyright issues and the SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

If some of these jobs you don’t have the time to deal with and it exceeds your budget to hire somebody else, try to manage by using a helping software or template. Such things can be very handy and are usually affordable. For instance a Microsoft Word can be your content’s spell checker; Google AdWords will help you advertise the business for small money, government website www.copyright.gov can help you understand the copyright law better, etc... Beside that there is a ton of good material online regarding SEO and other components that is available online for free or a small fee.

Maintenance of a site is very big and expensive job

Maintaining a site is in vast majority of cases a very simple and quick job and as such should not be expensive.

Although there are options to purchase a web designing company that maintains your website for a monthly fee, try to avoid that. Unless your are completely re-designing your site, modifications will usually be small and quick so there is no need for a monthly maintenance fee.

 If you can do it by yourself, utilize a help of some of the popular web design software that offer template based modifications such as Adobe’s Dreamweaver. Via a template you can modify many pages with one click on a “save a template” button.

If you are forced to use third party software to maintain and change your site, a good advice would be to use a CMS (Content Management System) such as WordPress. There, after login and online modification you wanted to do, their script will modify your site for you automatically.

My site is old and I need a complete re-design

Unless there is time for a new visual style that suddenly became hype (i.e. 3D objects nowadays) and your website is really old (over 6 years) there probably won’t be a need to overhaul the complete site.

Sometimes you get tired with the looks of your site because you’ve visited it so many times but if it attracts visitors, ignore the feelings and stick with it.

Modify some smaller things like change some content, add a new gadget or tweak some navigation but restrain from a total overhaul unless it is really a necessity.

Once a site is online the job is done

A proper website is like a living being, it is never completely finished. 

As mentioned above, a website must be constantly updated, new things added, preferable once a week, modified existing things and “listen” constantly for suggestions or reactions from your visitors.

Customers will come once after a site is built

That is never the truth. Customers have to be attracted to the site first, then kept there and then hopefully guided to a purchase “department”.

To attract customer you must have a clear goal about the purpose of your site and its content and then work on the psychology of a potential customer. That means that if your are selling used car parts you will probably attract more male and perhaps younger clientele and you have to develop your SEO marketing in that direction. Once they visit the site, the content must increase their interest into the product or products, which hopefully leads to the purchasing or at least to the customer’s satisfaction with the site he or she just visited.

Branding, marketing and SEO is easy to cope with

Unless you are a specialist in marketing or know your audience perfectly, it would be a good idea to try to look for the website optimization ideas elsewhere.

As mentioned above there is a lot of cheap material online that will help you understand marketing better but it is a good advice to occasionally look for help with the professionals. It doesn’t have to be expensive but could be very useful as they might be able to point at some improvements you haven’t been able to foresee yourself.

We have the same story with the branding as we had with the marketing. Even if you are a good graphic designers you still need to know how to conduct a brand’s message to your customers and it is a good idea to look for a solution through an external designer or an online material that is also well represented.