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Top Five Failures of Small Business Websites

Summary

Poor design, a lack of search engine optimisation and technical failures can render a small business website useless. This article examines five common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Introduction

A website can be one of the most valuable and cost-effective tools that a small business can have. Yet most fail to bring any real benefits for their owners.

In this article, I'll look at how small businesses end up with websites as useful as chocolate fireguards.

Whether you are a small business owner thinking of designing (or paying somebody to design) a website, or you already have an ineffective website, I hope this article will be of some use.

1. Poor/No Search Engine Listings

This has to go straight in at number one.

There is absolutely no point in your small business having a web presence unless people can find you. Most small businesses are not household names and rarely have the most catchy or obvious domain names (think www.tesco.com or www.natwest.com). So we have to get in the one place most web users can find you: search engines.

Getting a listing on the first few pages of search results in Google, MSN Search and Yahoo! will ensure that you get a steady stream of visitors to your site. As a small business looking to expand on the web, it is extremely important that you do all you can to make sure your website gets the best listings possible.

Search engine optimisation is a huge and complex beast, but there are some simple steps you can take to make your website more search engine friendly. Check out my search engine optimisation tips.

2. Ugly Design

Yep, not very technical this one. If your website looks awful then you could be turning potential customers away in their droves.

The year is 2005. The world wide web is a part of people's everyday lives. It is no longer a novelty, but a tool. If your website looks anything other than clean, professional and 100% functioning, visitors will simply go elsewhere.

Go back to basics:

Already got a website? If it hasn't been overhauled in the last 2 years, get it done now. The standards of web design are much higher now than in 1998, so make sure you haven't been left behind.

3. Splash Pages

At some point in the distant past, somebody decided it'd be cool to have a completely pointless page to stop people from getting to the thing they want to see: your website. It's called a 'splash page'.

If you're thinking about having a splash page on your website: don't. If you have one: get rid of it. If your web designer suggests one: sack him.

There is no logic whatsoever in have a device which specifically prevents your potential customers from viewing your website. Enough said.

4. Slow Loading Pages

Another very common fault with poorly designed websites is their loading times (or 'page weight', although it could just as easily be called 'page wait'!).

Huge photos or graphics, Flash Animations and Java Applets can increase the size of your pages tenfold. At the time of writing, 50% of UK internet users are on dial-up connections. Is your website so important that they'll wait 60 seconds for it to download?

Nobody wants to wait for bloated, oversized websites to download. Learn to optimise your graphics for the web and avoid any sort of multimedia files unless absolutely necessary.

5. Cross Browser Compatibility

Many web designers aren't aware that there are browsers other than Internet Explorer and systems other than PCs.

With the increasing popularity of non-IE browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, poorly coded, non-standard websites are set for a hard time. Around 1 in 10 visitors are now using a browser other than IE. That's 10%. That's a lot of potential customers.

Make sure that your website is coded to a W3C standard such as HTML 4.01 or (preferably) XHTML 1.1, and check it in as many different browsers and platforms as possible. Not only will this will help to prolong its life, but it'll also make your business accessible to as many people as possible.

Steve HollisSteve Hollis
18th August 2005
http://www.dogfoodmedia.co.uk