A website is a vital business asset. For those offering software, services, or expertise, a website is the first impression, the trust-building tool, the lead-generation platform, and the customer educator.
Unfortunately, business owners often rush into design and development without taking the time to actually plan. So they end up with a really nice-looking site that doesn’t actually do much for business growth.
Here are seven common planning mistakes to avoid before you start building – or rebuilding – your website.
#1. Choosing trendy designs over brand-appropriate designs
The temptation to add sleek animations, gradients, flashy features, or whatever is trending in website design at the moment is strong. However, trends come and go. Your website needs to feel like your brand. It should reflect your brand’s identity, value proposition, and the preferences and expectations of your audience.
#2. Not planning for scalability
Your site needs room to grow along with your business. This could mean adding more service/feature pages, scaling your blog across categories, introducing content in new formats, and so on.
If your structure and website set-up are not designed to scale, you’ll end up rebuilding much sooner than you’d like.
#3. Letting too many people influence decisions
It’s great to involve various departments and expertise levels in the brainstorming part – design, marketing, product, leadership, customer support, and sales. Each has insights to bring to the discussion.
However, not everyone should have equal say all throughout the website development journey. When a website project becomes a committee activity, decisions become slow, the message becomes diluted, and the results become generic, representing the ‘happy equilibrium’ of opinions.
#4. Creating content for end-users instead of buyers
This is especially relevant in software and service businesses where the user and the buyer may be different people.
Your website’s copy and visuals need to speak to the buyer’s priorities and the user’s experience. Writing only for the user risks creating a site that’s informative but not persuasive.
#5. Prioritizing keywords over creating a compelling copy for the target audience
SEO is important. No argument. However, it should never come at the expense of clarity.
Many businesses create copies with the sole purposes of ranking instead of focusing on resonating.
Showing up in Google search results is not the end goal. It’s a means to an end. Attracting the right people and converting them into clients or customers is the end goal.
So focus instead on the questions your audience is asking, the problems they are trying to solve, and the language they actually use.
#6. Carrying all content into the new site by default
Rebuilding a website is the perfect time to evaluate and clean up old content – pages, blog posts, landing pages, and other assets. You will be surprised to discover just how much of that content no longer reflects your brand’s positioning, is outdated, or is of low quality. Keep what’s valuable. Prune and refine the rest.
#7. Not clearly defining success or conversion goals
One of the first questions that business owners should ask themselves and answer is what their website should help the business do. Is it capturing leads? Facilitating sales conversations? Educating prospects? Supporting customer onboarding?
Of course, it is typically a mix of multiple goals. However, it’s best to define your KPIs and conversion paths early, and then design the site around those goals.
Thoughtful and strategic website planning planning will help your business avoid costly reworks down the line, as well as get a site that is aligned with your brand, your audience, and your goals.
